The Widow Waltz (20 page)

“M
y granddaughter Louisa is expecting,” Camille told her caretaker.

“That’s a blessing, ma’am,” the woman said. “A baby is always God’s gift.”

Camille was having what the nurses refer to as a good day. Where was everyone? she wondered—everyone being her family, which included Daniel, the only constituent who counted other than Maurice. Were they staying away because of the weather? Beyond her window it was snowing, which muffled the outside world and provoked contemplation.

“Are you chilly, Mrs. Waltz?” the nurse asked. She offered a mohair blanket, a recent holiday gift, and as she covered Camille’s legs, Camille took note of how spindly and mottled her calves had gotten. She detested the ugliness of age, which along with forgetfulness was encroaching like mildew.

Her granddaughters visited yesterday—yesterday for Camille being any time that wasn’t now. Louisa had a big announcement. She was going to have a baby. They expected their old granny to be shocked. Do her granddaughters imagine she doesn’t keep up with celebrities nowadays, who get married—if ever—years after a child arrives? Do they think she and Martin didn’t have Stephan underway before their wedding? It would take a lot more than an out-of-wedlock baby to shock Camille. The young were such innocents, each generation believing they had invented sex. How did they think they got here?

Camille was no less shocked when she found out about Ben and that hussy. Vera Levine stuck it to her with such swollen joy that she thought her old classmate would explode like that poor lady astronaut.

“My Phyllis saw your son-in-law in a compromising situation with another woman,” Vera had barked, using her arthritic claws like hooks to put quotes around
compromising situation
. “A hotsy-totsy number. People in the Hamptons are talking.”

“Give me a break,” Camille lashed back. “Your Phyllis lives in Westhampton. That doesn’t even count.”

Then she said to Vera . . . what? How did she swing back? Camille knew it was a choice riposte, one of her best, and that was saying a lot. Stephan would have been proud of her—Ben, too.

What was it? This had been happening lately, fade-outs, as if her batteries were dying.

Goddamnit.

“S
tephan,” I say, “I saw the ring.”

“Impossible.” My brother is speaking with all the confidence of a candidate who the Supreme Court has declared President of the United States. “You saw a ring that
resembles
the ring. The real deal is in my vault, or at least it was when I closed up yesterday.”

“I saw a ring exactly like the one you showed me,” I insist. “Clementine’s mother flashed it as if she was mooning me. I was meant to see it.” I hear my voice rising with each phrase. I am nearly shrieking.

“And her point is?”

I know my brother is giving me only half of his attention. I am calling him on a Saturday morning when he and Daniel are at Liberty Farm, their house in Bucks County, ninety miles from New York City. I can picture him assembling a cassoulet atop his Aga in the kitchen with its wide-plank flooring and cabinetry from a two-hundred-year-old monastery. Perhaps he’s sitting in the heated screened porch that overlooks the forest while he rereads
Swann’s Way
. Or he might be puttering in his greenhouse, propagating stem cuttings. Ninety percent of what I know about houseplants I have learned from my mother and brother.

“Listen to me. She wants to show that Ben was with her, not her daughter.” I can’t stand talking to Stephan and yet I can’t stand not to.

“Forget the ring. From what you’ve told me, this woman couldn’t possibly be your hubby’s type,” he adds. “Ben may have shown her the ring and she’s had it copied to throw you off her daughter’s scent. And you’re buying it. Don’t be a fool.”

“If you met her—Naomi—you’d get it. Bedroom voice, not the shy, retiring type.” And I saw what I saw.

“Rubbish, Miss Marple. What’s going on with Fleigelman? That’s what you should be concentrating on.”

“You and I have gone over this,” I say. “Wally’s forensic accountant has shown us all the records from stock trades. Ben sold everything off, but Wally and the accountant aren’t any closer to knowing where the cash went than I am. No wire transfers into other accounts or deposits to new bank accounts. No thrilling money laundering, at least that anyone can find.”

“I’m disappointed our boy Ben wasn’t a more complex villain. You’re telling me this isn’t
The Firm
?”

“There was a private post office box for a while, on Long Island.” I toss this out casually.

“Be still my beating heart.”

“Feeling better now?”

“What, dear God, was in it?”

“Nothing anymore.” After I produced a copy of Ben’s death certificate and proof that I was his executor along with Wally, a clerk unceremoniously opened the box. “There were copies of our tax returns, 1099s, and year-end brokerage statements. Nothing we hadn’t seen before. Wally, the accountant, and I have gone over everything six ways to Sunday and all we can know is that money disappeared.”

“To this Naomi and her daughter, you’re thinking?” Stephan asked.

“Yes, especially now.”

“Hold still until I’m back in the office Monday and have another look at the ring,” Stephan says. “Don’t be showing up at her door with the sheriff.”

I return to my essays, to helping Luey with the dogs, to repotting a cattleya that has sprouted a blossom the shade of lobster bisque, to laundry and ironing. I’ve discovered that I love removing every crumple until our shirts, dish towels, and pillowcases gratify me with smooth perfection. Luey draws the line at my taking a hot iron to jeans. I am also cooking—domesticity has become my ticket to hypnotic escape—because today I have guests coming for a late lunch. Beef barley soup is simmering and I will bake an apple tart. The rest of the morning will fly, and for that I am grateful: when I perform homely tasks, more galling considerations fade as I stir and starch within a bubble of wholesome utopia.

Luey joins me in the kitchen, followed by a maelstrom of barking and wagging.

“Need help?” she asks.

“With gratitude,” I say. My daughter has been taciturn since the evening she set out in a snowstorm. I hand her the peeler and nod toward a bowl of apples. “I’ll start on the crust.”

“Why the fuss?”

“Chip and Nat are coming for lunch.” I spread the dough on the counter and begin to roll. “A shame your plans didn’t work out the other night,” I say, trying to sound sincere, though I am a lifelong failure at teasing Luey out of foul moods. She’ll talk when she’s ready. I hope. After she’s finished with the apples, she sets the kitchen table while I start to assemble the tart.

“Want me to get the salad going?” she asks, making short work of the table. There are few decisions to make when you’ve sold off most of your possessions.

“It’s in the fridge,” I say, “but you can do dressing.”

“Aye-aye.” She gathers vinegar, oil, mustard, herbs, and a lemon to juice.

The weekly opera is playing. Listening to it was my mother’s tradition and I’ve started tuning in every Saturday. This week is
La Traviata
, Camille’s favorite.

“A courtesan knows she is dying,” I remember her explaining.

“What’s a courtesan?” I asked.

“A beautiful woman who men admire,” was all she told me. I bragged to friends about my mother being a courtesan until Stephan overheard and corrected me. Violetta and Alfredo are winding down with their duet in the first act when I ask, “Have you felt the baby kick yet?”

Luey turns, her face more animated than I’ve seen it in days. “I’m not sure. The way the blogs go on, describing a goldfish swimming circles in your belly . . . all I’ve felt is what I’m pretty sure is gas.”

“One day I felt as if corn was popping inside me,” I say, remembering the sweet sensation of Luey-baby kicking. “It took awhile to tell with you.”

My grown-up baby seems to be ruminating on this benign remark. Did I say something wrong? With Luey, I usually do.

“Ma, I want to run something by you,” she says, after a few minutes.

She’s backed off from
Georgia
. I brace myself as I slit the pastry. “Of course,” I say, as I brush my tart with melted butter. No wonder I have gained five pounds. I am a violin who’s turned into a viola and will become a cello if I don’t stop eating.

“I’m thinking of giving this baby up for adoption,” she says. “I’ve been reading everything I can find. I want my child to have a good home, to be loved by two parents who are ready for it. To . . .”

She lost me after “my child,”
because I am thinking of “this baby” as my child, too, my flesh, my blood, my lifeline to Ben.

“I don’t need to make a decision right away,” she says. “But soon.”

“I don’t have the right answer.” I’d need a machete to bushwhack through my thoughts and emotions. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t ask
for your answer.” She is back to sounding like the crank I love. “But I wanted you to know.”

I remember how it feels to be a wife who longs to be a mother and cannot have her own child. Then came Cola, my angel infant who, when we met, felt as if she’d always been mine. She may as well have come out of the womb in Korea holding an engraved note that said:
Special Delivery for Benjamin Silver and Georgia Waltz.
Luey could be an envoy of happiness for a couple like us.

In an enigmatic manipulation of fate, has her baby been destined all along to belong to another mother? I see this reasoning and applaud its honor, generosity, and wisdom. Giving up the baby is an act of courage that may make sense for Luey. She could turn the page and return to Stanford, unfettered by motherhood. The memory of the pregnancy would fade like a tan, until it feels like it never was.

Or, giving away the baby might be a decision Louisa Silver-Waltz would regret every day of her life, and as she grows old, she will search the face of every child the same age as hers, wondering.

I feel an attack of zealous love born of possession and connection. I am enough of a peasant spooked by superstition to try not to envision this baby—Ben’s long legs, Luey’s smile, my father’s dimples—but there are moments when imagination overrides better judgment and I do picture the child, my first grandchild. I want to tell Luey to abandon the idea of parting with this child because I’ll stay home and care for him or her while she goes back to school, but this isn’t my decision to make or even necessarily a good idea, for Luey, for the baby, for me. It would break my heart to part with my grandchild, but all I say is, “Now I know.”

“Good,” Luey answers, “because our guests are here.”

Chip drives too fast, always. His tires crunch my driveway where the gravel needs replenishing, an expense I will leave for the next owner.

He and Nat enter through the back door, like the dear friends they have become. Nat carries bags from a store that started out as a lowly fish market and has morphed into a gourmet shop stocked with overpriced but sublime roast chicken, silky pâtés, and takeaway crab cakes better than I could ever prepare myself. “Cheese and nibbles,” he says, putting down the bags on the counter. Owning a bookstore is lovely, but God bless his days on Wall Street that make it possible.

Chip places four bottles of wine—two red, two white—on the table. “Good news,” he says after kisses and greetings. “We may have something to toast. A couple who looked at the house has made a bid and—shocker—it’s not an insult.”

“H
ow did you find me?”

“I have my ways.”

The last person Nicola expected to see knocking on the glass reception wall of S. Waltz and Company was Michael T. Kim. There was no point in checking the leather-bound appointment book. (Uncle Stephan thought a schedule on a computer was more suited to a podiatrist or veterinarian.) She’d just written in an appointment for Monday and knew the rest of today was a yawning blank.

On Friday afternoons, customers able to afford merchandise sold by Stephan Waltz were either at better city hotels snacking from the minibar or had escaped to country homes. These included clients from South America, all points east, Hollywood, Houston, and Miami; and starting last week, Stephan, too, had headed to his farm. He let Nicola know that since he believed she’d found her “métier,” he would grant her the honor of being required to stay until the race between boredom and the clock was declared a tie at six p.m. Only then could she turn on the answering machine, lock up, and leave. For this, Nicola was grateful. If her weekends were demure and chaste, at least they were hers, except for the first Saturday of each month, when Uncle Stephan had allowed her to host her champagne bride-and-groom reception. The first one attracted forty nervous, blushing shoppers.

“Let me in,” Michael T. said, grinning and tapping on the glass. Nicola wondered, since she’d last seen him at the New Year’s party, was his hair better cut? Had he lost weight? He seemed almost chiseled. She’d considered his looks that of a Korean leprechaun, and had yet to see him scowl. Nicola couldn’t say whether his constant good nature was the result of unrelenting optimism, a surplus of confidence, or a facial tic. It certainly wasn’t because he was dumb. The type, however, to which she usually gravitated was brooding, perhaps with a cigarette dangling from sensuous lips, exuding earthy romance and God knows what. That type was Emile, and in her life the Emiles had always gotten fullest attention. Nonetheless, Michael T. was here, with an ear-to-ear smile reminding her that along with Mr. Rochester-like drama, life also needed gumdrops and Tootsie Rolls, at least metaphorically.

Nicola had strict orders to allow no one without an appointment past S. Waltz’s gilded threshold. “I can’t let you in,” she said. But this couldn’t apply to friends, could it?

“Please.”

“Don’t steal anything.” She unlocked the door.

Nicola had been deliberately vague with Michael T. about her job, which she couldn’t imagine he’d find impressive, so if it ended soon, she’d have nothing to explain. At any rate, it was a moot point because since the weekend they’d shared in Cambridge, their texts had dribbled from daily to weekly.

“How long are you in town?” she asked. She placed a kiss on his cheek, a gesture that promised friendship, nothing more. He smelled faintly of scotch.

“A month,” he answered, as he surveyed the small, plush foyer furnished with Queen Anne chairs, glass tables, and a loveseat upholstered in green silk jacquard. “I’m staying with my parents while I study for the boards.”

“What kind of doctor do you want to be?”

“A pediatrician.”

He’s his own man, she thought, more than a little pleased—and surprised—that he’d resisted parental pressure to go with neurosurgery, or at least cardiology.

“But tonight I’m stealing you away—if you’re free.”

Nicola considered the coy approach. She could intimate that she had long-standing theater tickets with someone exceptional or plans to go away for the weekend to a destination other than visiting her mother and sister, who were expecting her on the 10:20 train.

“I’m sadly free,” she admitted, nervously mirroring Michael T.’s smile.

“And hungry, I hope, because we’re going someplace special.” He punctuated this news with a thumbs-up. Nicola didn’t know if the gesture was earnest or ironic.

“Where?”

“You’ll see.”

Her mind floated toward the frontrunners on her short-list. If he’d asked, she’d have suggested Il Buco Alimentari, where she was convinced she was eating in the Italian hill country, not an industrial block in downtown Manhattan. Maybe he was splurging on a stars-aplenty spot she’d only read about—Per Se! Daniel! Del Posto!

“Should I go home and change?” Nicola asked, hopeful. She considered her attire. Her dress, which Uncle Stephan described as taupe. Would look even more sadly mouse colored after she would return the diamond chain around her neck to the vault.

“You look perfect.”

“Give me ten minutes then,” she said. “Have a seat . . . and a magazine.” Though she suspected
Town & Country
wouldn’t be of interest, Stephan also subscribed to
GQ
and
The Economist.

“I have plenty to read.” He lifted his messenger bag.

She locked up the inventory, saying good night to her current favorites: a chunky onyx pendant from the 1900s, a garnet-circled cameo of Lord Byron, and Goo Goo G’Jobb Goo, the walrus pin that she considered her pet. The sumptuous emerald-and-diamond ring that Uncle Stephan had tried to stump her with was still in its velvet box; what made this curious was that only yesterday a customer had asked specifically for a ring with diamonds or emeralds. “Something old, important, and unique.” Her uncle never took it out for even a glance.

Nicola locked the case, retouched her makeup in the back bathroom, sleeked her hair, sprayed on the perfume she stashed in her bag—Stephan forbid her to wear it in the office, claiming it corroded his goods—and slipped into her coat. She fingered the necklace she was still wearing, a simple chain with a diamond heart. She left it on.

“Hoo-boy,” Michael T. said, when she walked out to meet him.

It’s the perfume,
she thought, because frankly, she looked the same as before.

As they left the building onto Fifth Avenue, a taxi was discharging a passenger. “Our lucky day,” Nicola shouted. It was six-fifteen, when cabs were all but nonexistent.

“Sorry—too rich for my blood,” Michael T. said. “This way.” They continued northeast toward Bloomingdale’s, six blocks, and downstairs to the subway platform.

“Where are we headed?” she asked.

He bobbed his head toward a sign, his elfish amusement intact. They’d be traveling in a direction that, in all of Nicola’s years as a subway rider, she’d never ventured. Queens. Were they eating with his parents, she wondered?
Please, no. Let it at least be a beer garden.
Every time she opened
Time Out New
York
they were laying it on thick about outer-borough gastropubs serving homemade pickles, deviled eggs, and craft brews—code, in her book, for cheap date.

The train chugged along. She stood sandwiched between a backpack attached to a traveler who smelled as if he had last bathed in Belfast and a tall, shaved-head teenager whose piercings marched like ants toward his ear. Michael T. caught her up on his training for a charity triathlon—because medical school apparently wasn’t enough to keep him busy—and how his younger sister was debating between Dartmouth and Yale.

“How’s your sister?” he asked.

“Barefoot and pregnant,” Nicola said, and instantly regretted trash-talking Luey. “We’re all behind her, of course,” she added.

“Families hang together,” he said. “My grandmother raised me so my mom could work.”

“What does she do?” Nicola pictured the woman giving pedicures. Few things made her more uncomfortable than going into one of the nail salons on every other block in New York and having an older Korean woman pumice her feet. Once, Nicola had cried.

“She’s an ophthalmologist,” Michael T. said.

“And your dad?” Perhaps he owned a dry cleaners.

“Anesthesiologist,” he said. “You could say I’m going into the family business.” Which made Nicola even more impressed that he’d chosen pediatrics. They moved on to conversation that bounced from the benefits of a gluten-free diet and that their favorite movie was
Jules et Jim,
though they couldn’t agree which man the actress preferred, Jules or Jim. Picturing Michael T. examining a newborn baby, Nicola white-knuckled the overhead bar as the train sped, lurched, and finally stopped. He grabbed her by the elbow and led her to the platform. She saw a sign for an exit and pointed. “Here?”

“Not yet, we’re transferring!” he yelled over the din. Michael T. needled through the crowd, then squeezed her hand and said, “Here it comes.” The train screeched to a halt, discharged a clot of passengers, and the two of them boarded, grabbing empty seats next to each other. “You’re right, it is our lucky day,” he added. Nicola had a different opinion.

A few stations later, they lumbered upstairs and outside to a commercial street thick with traffic, mom-and-pop shops, and restaurant signs, many in Greek.

“Flushing?” she guessed.

He laughed. “How long have you lived in New York?”

“I love Greek food,” she volunteered.

“Me, too,” Michael T. said. “Patience, Cola.” Only her family used that name. He’d obviously called Luey or her mother to track her down. “And we’re here,” he said a few minutes later when they rounded a corner and stood facing a small mountain of a building.

Nicola had seen its sign many times when she’d ridden to the airport: K
AUFMAN
A
STORIA
S
TUDIOS
. Were they going to watch a taping? She’d like that. “Is this where they make TV shows and commercials?” she asked, lighting up.

“They do,” he said. “And once this was Paramount’s studio for silent movies. Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks . . . the greats. We’re going to eat in their old commissary.” Michael T. offered his arm as he pushed opened the wide front door. While they ascended a mahogany staircase, he continued to spew Wikipedia-worthy facts, ending with, “You can be Gloria Swanson and I’ll be Groucho! This is where they filmed
Cocoanuts
.”

Yes, their table was ready, the hostess—stylishly imposing with platinum hair and heavy black eye makeup—said, and led them through a crowded dining room to a prime spot, where Michael snapped Nicola’s picture again and again until she wanted to nuke the camera. Then he started in on W. C. Fields. While his cinematic enthusiasm appeared to be genuine, Nicola wished, finally, that he’d morph into a silent star himself. As they gobbled oysters Rockefeller washed down by cocktails from Nana’s youth, Nicola steered the conversation toward med school. Is it true you draw blood from each other to learn the technique? Remind me of your cadaver’s name. How many students snort coke to keep going?

When Nicola ran out of questions, Michael T. was forced to ask, “What do you do at this job of yours?”

She inflated the 10 percent of her tasks that were remotely creative.

“Do you see yourself working there long?” he asked, just as the server inquired, for the third time, if they’d like to order another after-dinner drink. Nicola was relieved to hear Michael T. offer to settle their bill. She noticed that he added an exceedingly generous tip—and that she was blotto. As they stumbled to the street, she had to grab his am. She was dreading the subway, that instrument of economy whose motion would certainly make her ill.

They wound their arms around each other, for stability as much as affection. He made a turn, then another. They weren’t yet at the subway stop, though the route seemed longer than she’d remembered from earlier in the evening. The street was dark and empty, and Nicola was becoming frightened when Michael T. announced, “We’re here.”

They entered a parking lot and stopped at a shiny blue Prius, whose doors he unlocked. “I know the way to Brooklyn Heights,” he said, “although you’ll have to direct me when we get near your uncle’s house.”

Nicola was pleased, relieved, and not too intoxicated to wonder aloud, “Do you think you’re in any shape to drive?”

“You’d be surprised at what a med student can do in this condition,” he said. In no position to challenge him, Nicola hooked up her seat belt, leaned back, and drew in the matchless aphrodisiac of new leather upholstery.

When she opened her eyes, they were exiting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Five minutes later, he was escorting her to the brownstone’s front door. They kissed under the lamplight until she fumbled with the locks and opened the door. As they climbed the stairs to her third-floor bedroom, Nicola gave the evening a seven. Demerits for the R train, points for that thing he just did with his tongue.

Michael T. made reservations and got good haircuts and wore well-shined shoes with laces, not scuffed loafers that needed new soles. He’d decided to be a doctor and, by God, he’d be a doctor. He owned a messenger bag, not a backpack, and somewhere, Nicola knew, there must be matching luggage. He had a little money, which he kept in a wallet. If her father were alive and visited them in the city where they lived, Michael T. wouldn’t just fight for the check. He’d have paid in advance, not, as Emile had done, let her father pick up the check at a four-star Parisian restaurant that Emile had selected.

Michael T. was the man.

Taking this into account, the next morning—which ended at one p.m.—she upgraded the evening’s score to nine. There was only one problem, which she discovered hours after Michael T. left: the small matter of a missing necklace with a diamond heart.