The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (3 page)

She looked up as we drove by, then lowered her eyes quickly.

The limo pulled out into the main road, and turned left in the direction of Manhattan. I fell back into the seat, spent. For a moment there was silence. Then Meg poked me with her elbow.

‘So,’ she said, ‘where’s my twenty bucks?’

A
FTER THE CEMETERY,
fifteen of the twenty graveside mourners returned to my mother’s place. It was quite a squeeze - as Mom had spent the last twenty-six years of her life in a small one-bedroom apartment on 84th Street and West End Avenue (and even on those truly rare occasions when she entertained, I can’t remember more than four people in her home at any given time).

I had never liked the apartment. It was cramped. It was badly laid out. Its southwest position on the fourth floor meant that it overlooked a back alleyway, and was rarely in contact with the sun. The living room was eleven feet by eleven, there was a bedroom of equal size, there was a small en-suite bathroom, there was a ten-by-eight kitchen with elderly appliances and scuffed linoleum. Everything about the apartment seemed old, tired, in desperate need of updating. Three years ago, I’d managed to convince Mom to get the place repainted - but, like so many old West Side apartments, this new coat of emulsion and gloss simply added another cheap veneer to plaster work and moldings that were already an inch thick with decades-worth of bad paint. The carpets were getting threadbare. The furniture was in need of recovering. What few so-called luxury items she owned (a television, an air-conditioner, an all-in-one stereo unit of indeterminate Korean origin) were all technologically backward. Over the past few years, whenever I had a bit of spare cash (which, it has to be said, wasn’t very often), I’d offer to update her TV or buy her a microwave. But she always refused.

‘You have better things to be spending your money on,’ she’d always say.

‘You’re my mom,’ I’d retort.

‘Spend it on Ethan, spend it on yourself. I’m fine with what I’ve got.’

‘That air-conditioner is asthmatic. You’re going to boil in July.’

‘I have an electric fan.’

‘Mom, I’m just trying to help.’

‘I know that, dear. But I am
just fine.’
She’d give the last two words such pointed, tetchy emphasis that I knew it was useless to pursue the issue. This topic of conversation was closed.

She was always denying herself everything. She hated the idea of turning into a burden. And - being a genteel, yet fiercely self-respecting WASP - she loathed the notion of being a suitable case for charity. Because, to her, it implied personal failure; a collapse of character.

I turned around from where I was standing in the living room, and caught sight of a cluster of framed family photos on an end table next to the sofa. I walked over and picked up a snapshot I knew all too well. It was of my father in his Army uniform. It was taken by my mother at the base in England where they met in 1945. It had been her one overseas adventure - the only time in her life that she ever left America. Having volunteered for the Red Cross after college, she’d ended up as a typist, working at an outpost of Allied Command HQ in suburban London. That’s where she encountered the dashing Jack Malone, cooling his Brooklyn heels after covering the Allied liberation of Germany for
Stars and Stripes
- the US Army newspaper. They had a fling - of which Charlie was the byproduct. And they suddenly found their destiny spliced together.

Charlie approached me. He looked down at the photograph I was holding.

‘Do you want to bring this back with you?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got a copy at home,’ he said. ‘It’s my favorite photo of Dad.’

‘I think I’ll take it then. I don’t have too many pictures of him.’

We stood there for a moment, wondering what to say next. Charlie chewed nervously on his lower lip.

‘You feeling better?’ I asked.

‘Fine, yeah,’ he said, averting his eyes as usual. ‘You bearing up?’

‘Me? Sure,’ I said, trying to sound unfazed by having just buried our mom.

‘Your son’s a great-looking kid. Was that your ex?’

‘Yeah - that’s the charmer. You’ve never met him before?’

Charlie shook his head.

‘Oh yes, I forgot - you missed my wedding. And Matt was out of town during your last trip here. Nineteen ninety-four, wasn’t it?’

Charlie ignored that question, and instead posed another:

‘He’s still something in television news, isn’t he?’

‘He’s now something very big. Like his new wife.’

‘Yeah, Mom did tell me about the divorce.’

‘Really?’ I said, sounding surprised. ‘When did she tell you? During your annual phone call in nineteen ninety-five?’

‘We spoke a little more than that.’

‘Sorry, you’re right. You also called her every Christmas. So, it was during one of your bi-annual phone calls that you discovered Matt had left me.’

‘I was really sad to hear about that.’

‘Hey, it’s ancient history now. I’m over it.’

Another awkward silence.

‘The place doesn’t look very different,’ he said, glancing around the apartment.

‘Mom was never going to make it into the pages of
House and Garden,
‘ I said. ‘Mind you, even if she’d wanted to do up the apartment - which she didn’t - money was always rather tight. Thank God the place was rent-stabilized - otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to stay on.’

‘What’s it now a month?’

‘Eighteen hundred - which isn’t bad for the neighborhood. But it was always a scramble for her to meet.’

‘Didn’t she inherit anything from Uncle Ray?’

Ray was Mom’s well-heeled brother - a big-deal Boston-based lawyer who maintained a starchy distance from his sister. From what I could gather, Mom was never particularly close to him when they were growing up - and they grew even further apart after Ray and his wife, Edith, voiced their disapproval of the Brooklyn Mick she had married. But Ray did live according to the WASP code of Doing the Proper Thing. So after my dad’s premature death, he came to the financial aid of his sister by offering to pay for the education of her two children. The fact that Ray and Edith had no kids of their own (and that Mom was Ray’s only sibling) probably made it easier for them to foot this hefty bill over the years - even though, when we were younger, it was pretty clear to Charlie and me that our uncle didn’t really want anything to do with us. We never saw him. Mom never saw him. We each received a twenty-dollar savings bond from him every Christmas. When Charlie was at Boston College, Ray never once invited him over to his Beacon Hill townhouse. I also got the cold shoulder while I was at Smith and dropping into Boston once a month. Mom explained his aloofness away by telling us, ‘Families can be odd.’ Still, fair credit to the guy: thanks to him, Charlie and I were able to attend private schools and private colleges. But as soon as I graduated from Smith in ‘76, Mom saw no more money from her brother - and she was always short of cash for the rest of her life. When Ray died in ‘98, I expected Mom to come into a little money (especially as Edith had pre-deceased her husband by three years). But she received nothing from his estate.

‘You mean, Mom never told you that Ray left her zilch?’ I asked.

‘All she said was that he had died.’

‘That was during your nineteen ninety-eight phone call, right?’

Charlie stared down at his shoes. ‘Yes - that’s right,’ he said quietly. ‘But I didn’t know she’d been cut out of his will like that.’

‘Yeah - Ray left everything to the nurse who’d been looking after him ever since Edith went to that big Episcopalian church in the sky. Poor old Mom - she always got shortchanged on everything.’

‘How did she manage to pay the bills?’

‘She had a small pension from the school. There was social security … and that was it. I offered to help her out, but, of course, she refused me. Even though I could have afforded it.’

‘You still with the same ad agency?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘But you’re some senior executive now, aren’t you?’

‘A senior copywriter, that’s all.’

‘Sounds pretty okay to me.’

‘The money’s not bad. But there’s a saying in my business: a happy copywriter is an oxymoron. Still, it passes the time and pays the bills. I just wish Mom had let me pay some of
her
bills. But she was adamant she wanted nothing from me. The way I figure it, she was either running an illegal canasta game, or she had a lucrative Girl Scout Cookie racket going on the side.’

‘You planning to close up this place now?’ Charlie asked.

‘I’m certainly not going to maintain it as a museum.’

I looked at him squarely. ‘You know you’re out of the will.’

‘I’m, uh, not surprised.’

‘Not that there’s much in her estate. Just before she went, she told me there was a bit of life insurance and some stock. Maybe fifty grand tops. Too bad you didn’t make contact with her six months ago. Believe me, she didn’t want to cut you out - and she kept hoping against hope that you’d make that one call. After they told her the cancer was terminal, she
wrote
you, didn’t she?’

‘She
never
mentioned in the letter that she was dying,’ he said.

‘Oh, that would have changed things, would it?’

Another of his evasive over-my-shoulder glances. My voice remained level.

‘You didn’t answer her letter, and you didn’t answer the messages I left for you when she was in her final days. Which, I have to say, was strategically dumb. Because had you shown your face in New York, you would now be splitting that fifty grand with me.’

‘I would never have accepted my share …’

‘Yeah, right.
Princess
would have insisted …’

‘Don’t call Holly that.’

‘Why the hell not? She’s the Lady Macbeth in this story.’

‘Kate, I’m really trying to …’

‘Do what? “Heal wounds”? Achieve “closure”?’

‘Look, my argument was never with you.’

‘I’m touched. Too bad Mom’s not here to see this. She always had these far-fetched romantic notions about everyone making up, and maybe seeing her West Coast grandkids again.’

‘I meant to call …’

‘
Meant
isn’t good enough.
Meant
means shit.’

My voice had jumped a decibel or two. I was suddenly aware that the living room had emptied. So too was Charlie, as he whispered, ‘Please, Kate … I don’t want to go back to the coast with such bad …’

‘Charlie, what the hell did you expect today? Instant reconciliation?
Field of Dreams?
You reap what you sow, pal.’

I felt a steadying hand on my arm. Aunt Meg.

‘Great sermon, Kate,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure Charlie now completely understands your point of view.’

I took a deep steadying breath. And said, ‘Yeah, I guess he does.’

‘Charlie,’ Meg said, ‘why don’t you go find yourself something alcoholic in the kitchen.’

Charlie did as commanded. The squabbling children had been separated.

‘You okay now?’ Meg asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I am definitely
not
okay.’

She motioned me towards the sofa. Sitting down next to me, her voice became conspiratorially quiet:

‘Back off the guy,’ she said. ‘I had a little talk with him in the kitchen. It seems he’s been juggling some very major problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘He was downsized four months ago. Fitzgibbon was taken over by some Dutch multinational, and they immediately canned half their Californian sales force.’

Fitzgibbon was the pharmaceuticals giant which had employed Charlie for the last twenty years. Charlie had started out as a San Fernando Valley sales rep, then gradually worked his way up to being Regional Sales Director for Orange County. And now …

‘Exactly how bad are his problems?’ I asked.

‘Put it this way - he had to borrow money from a friend to buy the plane ticket back here.’

Jesus.

‘And with two kids in college, financially speaking, things are hitting critical mass. He’s in really grim shape.’

I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. The poor idiot. Nothing ever seemed to work out Charlie’s way. He always had this unerring talent for making the wrong call.

‘From what I gather, the marital front is also pretty choppy. Because Princess isn’t exactly being the most supportive of spouses …’

Meg suddenly stopped talking and gave me a fast nudge with her elbow. Charlie had re-entered the room, his raincoat over his arm. I stood up.

‘What’s with the coat?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to get back to the airport,’ he said.

‘But you just arrived a couple of hours ago,’ I said.

‘I’ve got a big meeting first thing tomorrow,’ he said sheepishly. ‘A job interview. I’m, uh, kind of between things at the moment.’