The Interestings (21 page)

“‘Thinking about her,’” said Ash. “Well, I guess that’s true enough.” Then she said, “My feeling is that Cathy’s probably gone a little insane—remember how Jules described her when they went to the coffee shop?—and now she actually believes her own story. That’s what Dr. Spilka told Goodman. Isn’t that what he said, Goodman?”

“I don’t know,” said Goodman.

The trial was expected to be in the fall, and it was all that any of them could talk about over the rest of the school year. The outside world and its political chatter remained remote and of only intermittent interest, while Goodman’s upcoming trial and, well before that, the “adjourned date” in late April, when certain motions would be filed, the lawyer had explained, were far more compelling. Goodman prepped with his lawyer and his lawyer’s two associates; they wore him out with all their prepping. But no one saw the extent to which Goodman had just had enough of all this and could not take much more. The extent to which he was frightened, or to which maybe he felt guilty. Cathy had been strong and believable in the coffee shop, but Jules couldn’t hold on to her words. If she held on to them, if she remembered them and completely absorbed them, then she might not have still been lingering around the Labyrinth.

His family believed Goodman to be entirely innocent—though actually, Ash had confessed to Jules, she’d had an odd moment late one night with her mother, when Betsy had come into Ash’s room. “Sometimes I think the male of our species is unknowable,” Betsy Wolf had said, despairingly, in response to nothing. And Ash had tried to find out what she meant, but then her father appeared in the doorway, looking for her mother, and it became clear to Ash that her parents had been having an argument. Then they said good night to her; and weeks later, when Ash told the story to Jules, she said that she hadn’t known if her mother had been trying to find a way to talk about Goodman and who he was. Or whether, instead, she’d only been making a comment about Gil, after a marital argument that, one way or another, must surely have been about Goodman. Maybe Betsy, who’d always protected and loved her difficult son, even as she pushed him in certain ways, had briefly wavered. But there was no way to know, because she never again said anything to suggest it. In fact, she even seemed to become more righteous about his innocence, disgusted by what Goodman had to endure.

None of the Wolfs had spoken to Cathy, as Ethan and Jules had. But even having spoken to her, Ethan and Jules were only sixteen years old, and much later it would be clear that they couldn’t have been expected to know what to do, or exactly what to feel. Cathy’s words had been disturbing, even shocking, but the firm, unified belief of the Wolf family carried its own, more significant weight.

At the Wolfs’ apartment, everyone nervously watched Goodman, and they saw him become almost a non-person, and they said to one another, “At least he’s still going to Dr. Spilka,” as though this psychoanalyst they’d never met could keep him intact. Even when Ash heard Dr. Spilka’s halting voice on the Wolfs’ answering machine on a Thursday afternoon in early April, she wasn’t made anxious. “Hel-lo, this is Dr. Spilka,” he said in a formal voice. “Goodman did not show up for our appointment today. I would like to remind you of my twenty-four-hour cancellation policy. That is all. Good day.”

Ash, home after school and sitting in the kitchen with two classmates eating raw cookie dough and rehearsing for the upcoming Brearley play, Paul Zindel’s
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
, had been the one to play back the message on the machine, but she didn’t particularly worry when she heard it. So Goodman hadn’t been to his shrink today; big deal. He wasn’t a reliable person. She imagined he was lying on his bed down the hall right now listening to music or perhaps getting high, but she didn’t feel like interrupting her rehearsal to go in and visit her brother in his lair.

Ash Wolf had a great tolerance for the ways of boys; she forgave them their primitive traits, and she sympathized with Goodman almost entirely. When something happened to him, she’d once explained to Jules, it seemed as if it were happening to her too. She and her school friends rehearsed their lines from the sad and wonderful play about an emotionally disturbed mother and her daughters, and then after the other girls left, her own relievedly undisturbed mother came home from an afternoon of stuffing envelopes for a muscular dystrophy charity run by a friend whose son had the disease, and Ash helped her make dinner.

Even in the midst of Goodman’s tremendous problems, Betsy Wolf continued to prepare excellent meals. Ash was handed a rubber-banded bunch of leeks, and at the sink she unbound them, then soaked the individual thick-bulbed stalks to remove the sand and dirt, and chopped and sautéed them, and by the time her father walked into the apartment right before seven, already muttering about the latest legal bills, Ash remembered the phone call from Dr. Spilka, and that Goodman hadn’t yet left his foul cave. She felt uneasy suddenly, and went to his door, banged once, then entered. The place was much cleaner than usual. Sometime between last night and this morning when he was supposed to have left for school, her brother had actually cleaned his room. He had lined up his little architectural models on the desk, and he had made his bed. It was as disturbing in there as a crime scene, and Ash turned and ran back down the hall to get her parents.

Goodman was really gone; gone with the passbook from a special account his maternal grandfather had set up for him at Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust. His parents had arranged for a cap on all withdrawals, making sure Goodman never dipped in too deeply to buy drugs or do something stupid. Today, they learned, he had made the maximum withdrawal. He was also gone with his passport, as well as every other relevant official document that he’d been able to find, including his birth certificate and his social security card, which had been kept in a catchall drawer in his parents’ bedroom bureau. He’d just dug around in there when no one was in the room and grabbed whatever had his name printed on it. Maybe he was planning on leaving the country, maybe not. If you thought of Goodman Wolf, there wasn’t any one place that you imagined he might go.

Except, said Ash, for Spirit-in-the-Woods. He loved it there so much; he was a powerful figure there, he had currency, he was seen as big and important and erotically charged and free of his father’s criticism, and, of course, he was happy there. It was a long shot, but Gil Wolf called the Wunderlichs and asked if by any chance their “wayward son” had turned up today. Gil tried to keep his voice light. The Wunderlichs, who already knew something about the legal situation, said no, they’d been away in Pittsfield for the day, but to their knowledge Goodman had not been there.

Next the Wolfs called Dick Peddy, who instructed them on what and what not to do. “We don’t have to jump to conclusions,” Dick said.

“Jesus, I’ve already done that, Dick. The kid is gone.”

“You don’t know that. Consider his absence a kind of reflective vacation.”

“Reflective? Goodman doesn’t reflect; he just
does
.”

“As long as he shows up on the adjourned date,” said the lawyer, “then all will be well.”

The Wolfs knew that Goodman was not likely to show up then; why would he have left home, only to appear in court on the appointed day? Their best hope was that he was with some pot-smoking friend in the city who they didn’t know about—and that he would crash at this friend’s place in the interim and eventually would come home, or would even just show up at the court in a couple of weeks in wrinkled, unwashed clothes.

At nine a.m. on the adjourned date, Betsy and Gil Wolf sat very still in the paneled courtroom on the fourth floor of a courthouse downtown, and waited with their lawyer. The assistant DA coughed repeatedly, and the judge offered him a lozenge. “Fisherman’s Friend; works wonders,” said the judge, taking out a little rattling tin box from a drawer and handing it to the bailiff, who handed it to the assistant DA. Minutes passed; Goodman did not show. A bench warrant was issued, and Detectives Manfredo and Spivack took the Wolfs aside and instructed them that as soon as they heard from Goodman, they needed to report it, as well as urge Goodman to turn himself in.

When the city tabloids found out that the boy who’d been arrested on New Year’s Eve at Tavern on the Green had not shown up for a court appearance, they sent photographers to hang around outside the Labyrinth, and Ash was discreetly approached as she headed for the crosstown bus to school. “Prep-School Park Perp Flight Shocker” was not a story with much traction, though, because in the last days of April, two men were apprehended after they’d robbed and shot a fifty-year-old woman in Central Park, near the Boat Basin. Now, whenever Goodman was occasionally mentioned in the
Post
and the
Daily News,
it was in the context of the dangers of Central Park, particularly for women. Unrelatedly, a hundred-pound tree branch broke off and killed a teenaged girl in the park near 92nd Street, but still all these stories were unsettling. The whole city had begun to seem even more unsavory, and not just the park. Muggings were constant. The squeegee men stood at the mouths of tunnels with their tools and buckets of dark water, aggressively approaching cars. Goodman Wolf, Prep-School Park Perp, became just a small part of a big, seething story, mild in comparison with what would come.

It would be ten years before the notorious case in which another prep-school boy attacked a girl in Central Park, but that boy also killed that girl. And it would be thirteen years before a young female investment banker out for a jog in the park at night was raped and beaten into a coma, thought to be the victim of a gang of boys out “wilding,” as people called it, though much later the convictions would be overturned when someone else confessed. Who ever knew what really happened? The park was a dark, beautiful, and now intimidating stretch of green that seduced and divided the city.

Decades earlier, Manny and Edie Wunderlich had traveled through New York on elevated trains. They went to Socialist meetings and avant-garde operas, and then, eventually, to folk club after folk club, and every single activity apparently cost “a nickel,” at least the way they told it. The Hudson River shone on one side of Manhattan, the East River on the other. Between the two rivers, young bohemians owned this place. Now they no longer did, and because of that it was all much worse. But Goodman wasn’t lumped in with the worst; he was given a tiny mention in the catalog of the great city’s decline; and with a little time, he faded away.

But here he was now, still—vivid, fresh, the locus of a pain that didn’t lessen. Ash was on the phone constantly to Jules, crying and smoking and talking, or else just being silent; she missed Goodman so much, she said. She knew he was a fuckup, but until now all his fuckups had been redeemable. This had been his role since they were kids; and it had been almost funny back then, because he was also charming and bad and always made family life so much livelier. He used to dress their dog, Noodge, in Ash’s training bra. He used to wake Ash up in the middle of the night and take her up onto the forbidden roof of the Labyrinth, where they would sit sharing a bag of mini-marshmallows while looking out over the paused, exhaling city. Her parents’ sadness at their loss was intolerable now, and so was her own.

One Saturday morning in May, Ash took the Long Island Railroad out to Underhill to spend the weekend at the Jacobsons’. There was a time when Jules would have dissuaded her from coming, but not now. None of her friends had seen her small house or her dull, unfancy suburb; they had all expressed an interest in visiting her before, but Jules had deflected it, saying something meaningless like, “All in good time, my pretty.” But now Ash needed to get away from her parents and the city. Before she arrived, Jules went around the house, glaring at everything, trying to find clever ways to make the place look better. She stalked through the rooms, her eyes narrowed in assessment, snatching up an ugly ashtray and spiriting it into a drawer, removing a pillow that her mother’s sister, Aunt Joan, had embroidered from a kit with the words
Home Is the Place Where When You Have to Go There They Have to Take You In—Robert Frost
. Jules couldn’t bear the image of Aunt Joan, who had never read a poem in her
life,
stitching the name
Robert Frost
in green yarn, as if that somehow made her “literary.” The pillow went into the drawer beside the ashtray, and as Jules closed the drawer her mother saw her and said, “What are you doing?”

“Just straightening up.”

Lois glanced around the room, noticing the way the rug had been vacuumed within an inch of its life, items on surfaces had been regrouped, and a shawl had been thrown across the couch, not to hide any stain or imperfection but to hide the couch itself. Seeing her mother see the house from Jules’s perspective made her ashamed of herself. Suddenly Lois Jacobson, who had been given no credit for anything, seemed to know everything. She’d lived through the death of her young husband, and now she was a single mother with two daughters, one in college at nearby Hofstra but living at home for financial reasons; and one who had made it clear that she preferred a richer, more sophisticated and engaging family over her own. Lois had recently started working again for the first time since getting married. “Women’s lib had something to do with it,” she’d said. “But also I need the income now.” She had gotten a job as an assistant to the principal at the Alicia F. Derwood Elementary School, where Jules and Ellen had once been students, and she liked being out of the house and in the jumping, unpredictable environment of the school.

“Well, it looks very nice,” Lois finally decided to say as she took in all that Jules had done to the living room. “Thank you.”

The bigger surprise that weekend was that Ash liked her mother, and that her mother liked Ash. The only uneasy person here was Jules, who found it hard to manage the overlap of these two worlds. When the train arrived, Ash stepped off onto the platform looking like a child who has been sent to the countryside to escape the London blitz. Jules, in the parking lot with her mother, leapt out of the car and strode up the metal steps to greet Ash, as if her city friend wouldn’t be able to descend these stairs without assistance.