"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

Chapter 4: Six Years

The autobiographer, mindful of her reader and the loss he suffered, and mindful that a certain kind of voice would do well to fall silent in the face of life’s increasing somberness, has been trying very hard to write these pages in first and second person. But she seems doomed, alas, as a writer, to be one of those jocks who refer to themselves in third person. Although she believes herself to be genuinely changed, and doing infinitely better than in the old days, and therefore worthy of a fresh hearing, she still can’t bring herself to let go of a voice she found when she had nothing else to hold on to, even if it means that her reader throws this document straight into his old Macalester College wastebasket.

The autobiographer begins by acknowledging that six years is a lot of silence. At the very beginning, when she first left Washington, Patty felt that shutting up was the kindest thing she could do both for herself and for Walter. She knew that he’d be furious to learn that she’d gone to stay with Richard. She knew that he’d conclude she had no regard for his feelings and must have been lying or deceiving herself when she’d insisted she loved him and not his friend. But let it be noted: before going up to Jersey City, she did spend one night alone in a D.C. Marriott, counting the heavy-duty sleeping pills she’d brought along with her, and examining the little plastic bag that hotel guests are supposed to line their ice buckets with. And it’s easy to say, “Yes, but she didn’t actually kill herself, did she?” and figure she was just being self-dramatizing and self-pitying and self-deceiving and other noxious self-things. The autobiographer nevertheless maintains that Patty was in a very low place that night, the lowest ever, and had to keep forcing herself to think of her children. Her pain levels, though perhaps no greater than Walter’s, were great indeed. And Richard was the person who’d put her in this situation. Richard was the only person who could understand it, the only person she didn’t think she’d die of shame to see, the only person she was sure still wanted her. There was nothing she could do now about having wrecked Walter’s life, and so, she thought, she might as well try to save her own.

But also, to be honest, she was furious with Walter. However painful it had been for him to read certain pages of her autobiography, she still believed he’d committed an injustice in throwing her out of the house. She thought he’d overreacted and wronged her and was lying to himself about how much he’d wanted to be rid of her and go to his girl. And Patty’s anger was compounded by jealousy, because the girl really did love Walter, whereas Richard isn’t the sort of person who can really love anyone (except, to a touching degree, Walter). Although Walter undoubtedly didn’t see things this way himself, Patty felt justified in going to Jersey City for such consolation and payback and self-esteem bolstering as sleeping with a selfish musician could provide.

The autobiographer will skim over the particulars of Patty’s months in Jersey City, admitting only that her scratching of her ancient itch was not without its intense if short-lived pleasures, and noting that she wished she’d scratched it when she was 21 and Richard was moving to New York, and had then gone back to Minnesota at summer’s end and seen if Walter might still want her. Because let it also be noted: she didn’t have sex one single time in Jersey City without thinking of the last time she and her husband had done it, on the floor of her room in Georgetown. Though Walter no doubt imagined Patty and Richard as monsters of indifference to his feelings, in fact they could never escape his presence. Regarding, for example, whether Richard should make good on his commitment to help Walter with his anti-population initiative, they simply took it for granted that Richard had to do it. And not out of guilt but out of love and admiration. Which, given how much it cost Richard to pretend to more famous musicians that he cared about world overpopulation, ought to have told Walter something. The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn’t help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas, with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in its realization, that their story would change and deepen. When Patty heard from her kids about the crazy speech he’d made in West Virginia, she despaired altogether. It seemed as if Walter had needed only to get rid of her to become a freer person. Their old theory-that he loved and needed her more than she loved and needed him-had been exactly backwards. And now she’d lost the love of her life.

Then came the terrible news of Lalitha’s death, and Patty felt many things at once: great sorrow and compassion for Walter, great guilt about the many times she’d wished Lalitha dead, sudden fear of her own death, a momentary flicker of selfish hope that Walter might take her back now, and then great sickening regret for having gone to Richard and thereby ensured that Walter would never take her back. As long as Lalitha was alive, there’d been a chance that Walter would tire of her, but once she died there was no hope at all for Patty. Having hated the girl and made no secret of it, she had no right to console Walter now, and she knew it could only seem monstrous of her to use such a sad occasion to try to worm her way back into his life. She tried for many days to compose a condolence note worthy of his grief, but the chasm between the purity of his feelings and the impurity of her own was unbridgeable. The best she could do was convey her sorrow secondhand, through Jessica, and hope that Walter would believe that the yearning to comfort him was there in her, and that he might see how, having sent no condolence, she could then never communicate about anything else. Hence, from her side, these six years of silence.

The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty left Richard immediately after Lalitha died, but in fact she stayed another three months. (Nobody will ever mistake her for a pillar of resolve and dignity.) She knew, for one thing, that it would be a long time, possibly forever, before somebody she really liked would want to sleep with her again. And Richard, in his stalwart if unconvincing way, was doing his best to be a Good Man now that she’d lost Walter. She didn’t love Richard a lot, but she did somewhat love him for this effort (although even here, let the record show, she was actually loving Walter, because it was Walter who’d put the idea of being a Good Man into Richard’s head). He manfully sat down to the meals she made him, he forced himself to stay home and watch videos with her, he weathered her frequent downpours of emotion, but she was forever aware of how inconveniently her arrival had coincided with his reawakening commitment to music-his need to be out all night with his bandmates, or alone in his bedroom, or in numerous other girls’ bedrooms-and although she respected these needs in the abstract, she couldn’t help having her own needs, such as the need not to smell some other girl on him. To absent herself and earn some money, she worked evenings as a barista, making exactly those coffee drinks she’d once ridiculed the idea of making. At home, she struggled hard to be funny and agreeable and not a pain in the ass, but before long her situation became rather hellish, and the autobiographer, who has probably already said far more about these matters than her reader cares to hear, will spare him the scenes of petty jealousy and mutual recrimination and open disappointment that led to her parting with Richard on not very good terms. The autobiographer is reminded of her country’s attempts to extricate itself from Vietnam, which ended with our Vietnamese friends being thrown off the top of the embassy building and shoved away from the departing helicopters and left behind for massacre or brutal internment. But that is truly all she’s going to say about Richard, except for one further small note toward the end of this document.

For the last five years, Patty has been living in Brooklyn and working as a teacher’s aide in a private school, helping first-graders with their language skills and coaching softball and basketball in the middle school. How she found her way to this wretchedly paid but otherwise nearly ideal job was as follows.

After she left Richard, she went to stay with her friend Cathy in Wisconsin, and it happened that Cathy’s partner, Donna, had had twin girls two years earlier. Between Cathy’s job as a public defender and Donna’s at a women’s shelter, the two of them together earned one decent salary and were getting one person’s decent night’s sleep. So Patty offered her services as a full-time babysitter and instantly fell in love with her charges. Their names are Natasha and Selena, and they are excellent, unusual girls. They seemed to have been born with a Victorian sense of child comportment-even their screaming, when they felt obliged to do it, was preceded by a moment or two of judicious reflection. The girls were primarily focused on each other, of course, always watching each other, consulting each other, learning from each other, comparing their respective toys or dinners with lively interest but rarely competition or envy; they seemed jointly wise. When Patty spoke to one of them, the other also listened, with an attention that was respectful without being timid. Being two years old, they had to be watched constantly, but Patty literally never tired of it. The truth was-and it made her feel better to be reminded of this-she was as good with little kids as she was terrible with adolescents. She took a deep ongoing delight in the miracles of motor-skill acquisition, of language formation, of socialization, of personality development, the twins’ progress sometimes clearly visible from one day to the next, and in their innocence of how hilarious they were, in the clarity of their needing, and in the utter trust they placed in her. The autobiographer is at a loss to convey the concreteness of her delight, but she could see that one mistake she hadn’t made about herself was wanting to be a mother.

She might have stayed much longer in Wisconsin if her father hadn’t gotten sick. Her reader has no doubt heard about Ray’s cancer, the aggressive suddenness of its onset and swiftness of its progress. Cathy, who is herself very wise, urged Patty to go home to Westchester before it was too late. Patty went with much fear and trembling and found her childhood home little changed from the last time she’d set foot in it. The boxes of outdated campaign materials were even more numerous, the mildew in the basement even more intense, Ray’s towers of Times-recommended books even higher and more teetering, Joyce’s binders of untried Times Food Section recipes even thicker, the piles of unread Times Sunday magazines even more yellowed, the bins of recyclables even more overflowing, the results of Joyce’s wishful attempts to be a flower gardener even more poignantly weedy and random, the reflexive liberalism of her world-view even more impervious to reality, her discomfort in her oldest daughter’s presence even more pronounced, and Ray’s snide jollity even more disorienting. The serious thing that Ray was now disrespectfully laughing at was his own impending death. His body, unlike everything else, was greatly changed. He was wasted and hollow-eyed and pallid. When Patty arrived, he was still going to his office for a few hours in the morning, but this lasted only another week. Seeing him so sick, she hated herself for her long coldness to him, hated her childish refusal to forgive.

Not that Ray, of course, was not still Ray. Whenever Patty hugged him, he patted her for one second and then pulled his arms away and let them wave in the air, as if he could neither return her embrace nor push her away. To deflect attention from himself, he cast about for other things to laugh at-Abigail’s career as a performance artist, the religiosity of his daughter-in-law (about which more later), his wife’s participation in the “joke” of New York State government, and Walter’s professional travails, which he’d read about in the Times. “Sounds like your husband got involved with a bunch of crooks,” he said one day. “Like he might be a little bit of a crook himself.”

“He’s not a crook,” Patty said, “obviously.”

“That’s what Nixon said, too. I remember that speech like it was yesterday. The president of the United States assuring the nation that he is not a crook. That word, ‘crook.’ I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I am not a crook.’ Hilarious.”

“I didn’t see the article about Walter, but Joey says it was totally unfair.”

“Now, Joey is your Republican child, is that correct?”

“He’s definitely more conservative than we are.”

“Abigail told us she practically had to burn her sheets after he and his girlfriend stayed in her apartment. Stains everywhere, apparently. The upholstery, too.”

“Ray, Ray, I don’t want to hear about it! Try to remember I’m not like Abigail.”

“Ha. I couldn’t help thinking, when I read that article, about that night when Walter got so exercised about his Rome Club. He was always a bit of a crank. That was always my impression. I can say that now, can’t I?”

“Why, because we’re separated?”

“Yeah, that, too. But I was thinking, because I’m not going to live long, I might as well speak my mind.”

“You always spoke your mind. To a fault.”

Ray smiled at something in this. “Not always, Patty. Less than you might think, actually.”

“Name one thing you ever meant to say but didn’t.”

“I was never very good at expressing affection. I know that was hard for you. Hardest for you, probably. You always took everything so seriously, compared to the others. And then you had that terrible luck in high school.”

“I had terrible luck with how you guys handled it!”

At this Ray raised a warning hand, as if to forestall further unreasonableness. “Patty,” he said.

“Well, I did!”

“Patty, just-just-. We all make mistakes. My point is that I do have a, ah. I do have affection for you. A lot of love. It’s just hard for me to show it.”

“Tough luck for me, then, I guess.”

“I’m trying to be serious here, Patty. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“I know you are, Daddy,” she said, breaking down in somewhat bitter tears. And he did his patting thing again, putting his hand on her shoulder and then drawing it away indecisively and letting it hover; and it was clear to her, finally, that he could be no other way.

While he was dying, and a private nurse came and went, and Joyce repeatedly, with contortionate apologies, slipped off to Albany for “important” votes, Patty slept in her childhood bed and reread her favorite childhood books and combated the household’s disorder, not bothering to ask permission to throw away magazines from the 1990s and boxes of literature from the Dukakis campaign. It was the season of seed catalogues, and she and Joyce both gratefully seized on Joyce’s sporadic passion for gardening, which gave them one common interest to talk about, instead of zero. As much as possible, though, Patty sat with her father, held his hand, and allowed herself to love him. She could almost physically feel her emotional organs rearranging themselves, bringing her self-pity plainly into view at last, in its full obscenity, like a hideous purple-red growth in her that needed to be cut out. Spending so much time listening to her father make fun of everything, albeit a little more feebly each day, she was disturbed to see how much like him she was, and why her own children weren’t more amused by her capacity for amusement, and why it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids’ response to her. Her dream of creating a fresh life, entirely from scratch, entirely independent, had been just that: a dream. She was her father’s daughter. Neither he nor she had ever really wanted to grow up, and now they worked at it together. There’s no point in denying that Patty, who will always be competitive, took satisfaction in being less embarrassed by his sickness, less afraid, than her siblings were. As a girl, she’d wanted to believe that he loved her more than anything, and now, as she squeezed his hand in hers, trying to help him across distances of pain that even morphine could only shorten-could not make disappear-it became true, they made it true, and it changed her.

At the memorial service, which was held in the Unitarian church in Hastings, she was reminded of Walter’s father’s funeral. Here, too, the turnout was enormous-easily five hundred people. Seemingly every lawyer, judge, and current or former prosecutor in Westchester attended, and the ones who eulogized Ray all said the same thing: that he was not only the ablest attorney they’d ever known but also the kindest and hardest-working and most honest. The breadth and height of his professional reputation were dizzying to Patty and a revelation to Jessica, who was sitting beside her; Patty could already anticipate (accurately, it turned out) the reproaches that Jessica would be leveling at her, afterward, and with justice, for having denied her a meaningful relationship with her grandfather. Abigail went to the pulpit and spoke on the family’s behalf, attempted to be funny and came off as inappropriate and self-involved, and then partially redeemed herself by crumbling into sobs of grief.

It was only when the family filed out, at the service’s end, that Patty saw the assortment of unprivileged people filling the rear pews, more than a hundred in all, most of them black or Hispanic or otherwise ethnic, in every shape and size, wearing suits and dresses that seemed pretty clearly the best they owned, and sitting with the patient dignity of people who had more regular experience with funerals than she did. These were the former pro-bono clients of Ray’s or the families of those clients. At the reception, one by one, they came up to the various Emersons, including Patty, and took their hands and looked them in the eye and gave brief testimonials to the work that Ray had done for them. The lives he’d rescued, the injustices he’d averted, the goodness he’d shown. Patty was not entirely blown away by this (she knew too well the costs at home of doing good in the world), but she was still pretty well blown away, and she couldn’t stop thinking of Walter. She now sorely regretted the hard time she’d given him about his crusades for other species; she saw that she’d done it out of envy-envy of his birds for being so purely lovable to him, and envy of Walter himself for his capacity to love them. She wished she could go to him now, while he was still alive, and say it to him plainly: I adore you for your goodness.

One thing she soon found herself particularly appreciating about Walter was his indifference to money. As a kid, she’d been lucky enough to develop her own indifference, and, in the way of lucky people, she’d been rewarded with the further good luck of marrying Walter, whose non-acquisitiveness she’d enjoyed with minimal thought or gratitude until Ray died and she was plunged back into the nightmare of her family’s money issues. The Emersons, as Walter had told Patty many times, represented a scarcity economy. To the extent that he meant this metaphorically (i.e., emotionally), she could sometimes see that he was right, but because she’d grown up as the outsider and had excused herself from her family’s competition for resources, it took her a very long time to appreciate how the forever lurking but forever untappable wealth of Ray’s parents-the artificiality of the scarcity-was at the root of her family’s troubles. She didn’t fully appreciate it until she pinned Joyce down, in the days following Ray’s memorial service, and extracted the story of the Emerson family estate in New Jersey, and heard about the quandary in which Joyce now found herself.

The situation was this: as Ray’s surviving spouse, Joyce now owned the country estate, which had passed to Ray after August’s death, six years earlier. Ray had been constituted to laugh off and ignore the entreaties of Patty’s sisters, Abigail and Veronica, to “deal with” the estate (i.e., sell it and give them their share of the money), but now that he was gone Joyce was getting a daily drumbeat of pressure from her younger daughters, and Joyce was not well constituted to resist this pressure. And yet, unfortunately, she still had the same reasons that Ray had had for being unable to “deal with” the estate, minus only Ray’s sentimental attachment to it. If she put the estate on the market, Ray’s two brothers could make a strong moral claim to large shares of the sale price. Also, the old stone house was currently occupied by Patty’s brother, Edgar, his wife, Galina, and their soon-to-be-four little kids, and was unhelpfully scarred by Edgar’s ongoing DIY “renovations,” which, since Edgar had no job and no savings and many mouths to feed, had so far not advanced beyond certain random demolitions. Also, Edgar and Galina were threatening, if Joyce evicted them, to relocate to a West Bank settlement in Israel, taking with them the only grandchildren in Joyce’s life, and live on the charity of a Miami-based foundation whose in-your-face Zionism made Joyce extremely uncomfortable.

Joyce had volunteered for the nightmare, of course. She’d been attracted, as a scholarship girl, by Ray’s Waspiness and family wealth and social idealism. She’d had no idea what she was getting sucked into, the price she would end up paying, the decades of disgusting eccentricity and childish money games and August’s imperious discourtesy. She, the poor Brooklyn Jewish girl, was soon traveling on the Emerson dime to Egypt and Tibet and Machu Picchu; she was having dinner with Dag Hammarskjöld and Adam Clayton Powell. Like so many people who become politicians, Joyce was not a whole person; she was even less whole than Patty. She needed to feel extraordinary, and becoming an Emerson reinforced her feeling that she was, and when she started having children she needed to feel that they, too, were extraordinary, so as to make up for what was lacking at her center. Thus the refrain of Patty’s childhood: we’re not like other families. Other families have insurance, but Daddy doesn’t believe in insurance. Other families’ kids work afterschool jobs, but we’d rather have you explore your extraordinary talents and pursue your dreams. Other families have to worry about money for emergencies, but Granddaddy’s money means that we don’t have to. Other people have to be realistic and have careers and save for the future, but even with all of Granddaddy’s charitable giving there’s still a huge pot of gold out there for you.

Having conveyed these messages over the years, and having allowed her children’s lives to be deformed by them, Joyce now felt, as she confessed to Patty in her quavering voice, “unnerved” and “a tiny bit guilty” in the face of Abigail’s and Veronica’s demands for the liquidation of the estate. In the past, her guilt had manifested itself subterraneanly, in irregular but substantial cash transfers to her daughters, and in her suspension of judgment when, for example, Abigail hurried to August’s hospital deathbed late one night and extracted a last-minute $10,000 check from him (Patty heard about this trick from Galina and Edgar, who considered it highly unfair but were mostly chagrined, it seemed to her, not to have thought of the trick themselves), but now Patty had the interesting satisfaction of seeing her mother’s guilt, which had always been implicit in her liberal politics, applied to her own children in broad daylight. “I don’t know what Daddy and I did,” she said. “I guess we did something. That three of our four children are not quite ready to… not quite ready to, well. Fully support themselves. I suppose I-oh, I don’t know. But if Abigail asks me one more time about selling Granddad’s house… And, I guess, I suppose, I deserve it, in a way. I suppose, in my own way, I’m somewhat responsible.”

“You just have to stand up to her,” Patty said. “You have a right not to be tortured by her.”

“What I don’t understand is how you turned out to be so different, so independent,” Joyce said. “You certainly don’t seem to have these kinds of problems. I mean, I know you have problems. But you seem… stronger, somehow.”

No exaggeration: this was among the top-ten most gratifying moments of Patty’s life.

“Walter was a great provider,” she demurred. “Just a great man. That helped.”

“And your kids…? Are they…?”

“They’re like Walter. They know how to work. And Joey’s about the most independent kid in North America. I guess maybe he got some of that from me.”

“I’d love to see more of… Joey,” Joyce said. “I hope… now that things are different… now that we’ve been…” She gave a strange laugh, harsh and fully conscious. “Now that we’ve been forgiven, I hope I can get to know him a little.”

“I’m sure he’d like that, too. He’s gotten interested in his Jewish heritage.”

“Oh, well, I’m not at all sure I’m the right person to talk to about that. He might do better with-Edgar.” And Joyce again laughed in a strangely conscious way.

Edgar had not, in fact, become more Jewish, except in the most passive of senses. In the early nineties, he’d done what any holder of a PhD in linguistics might have done: become a stock trader. When he stopped studying East Asian grammar structures and applied himself to stocks, he in short order made enough money to attract and hold the attention of a pretty young Russian Jew, Galina. As soon as they were married, Galina’s materialistic Russian side asserted itself. She goaded Edgar to make ever larger amounts of money and to spend it on a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, and fur coats and heavy jewelry and other conspicuous articles. For a little while, running his own firm, Edgar became so successful that he showed up on the radar of his normally distant and imperious grandfather, who, in a moment of possible early senile dementia, soon after his wife’s death, greedily permitted Edgar to renovate his stock portfolio, selling off his American blue-chips and investing him heavily in Southeast Asia. August last revised his will and trust at the height of the Asian stock bubble, when it seemed eminently fair to leave his investments to his younger sons and the New Jersey estate to Ray. But Edgar was not to be trusted with renovations. The Asian bubble duly burst, August died soon after, and Patty’s two uncles inherited next to nothing, while the estate, due to the building of new highways and the rapid development of northwest New Jersey, was doubling in value. The only way Ray could hold off his brothers’ moral claims was to retain possession of the estate and let Edgar and Galina live on it, which they were happy to do, having been bankrupted when Edgar’s own investments tanked. This was also when Galina’s Jewish side kicked in. She embraced the Orthodox tradition, threw away her birth control, and aggravated her and Edgar’s financial plight by having a bunch of babies. Edgar had no more passion for Judaism than anybody else in the family, but he was Galina’s creature, all the more so since his bankruptcy, and he went along to get along. And, oh, how Abigail and Veronica hated Galina.

This was the situation that Patty set out to deal with for her mother. She was uniquely qualified to do it, being the only child of Joyce’s who was willing to work for a living, and it brought her the most miraculous and welcome feeling: that Joyce was lucky to have a daughter like her. Patty was able to enjoy this feeling for several days before it curdled into the recognition that, in fact, she was getting sucked back into bad family patterns and was competing with her siblings again. It was true that she’d already felt twinges of competition when she was helping to nurse Ray; but nobody had questioned her right to be with him, and her conscience had been clean regarding her motives. One evening with Abigail, however, was enough to get the old competitive juices fully flowing again.

While living with a very tall man in Jersey City and trying to look less like a middle-aged housewife who’d taken the wrong exit off the turnpike, Patty had bought a rather chic pair of stack-heeled boots, and it was perhaps the least nice part of her that chose to wear these boots when she went to see her shortest sibling. She towered over Abigail, towered like an adult over a child, as they walked from Abigail’s apartment to the neighborhood café at which she was a regular. As if to compensate for her shortness, Abigail went long with her opening speech-two hours long-and allowed Patty to piece together a fairly complete picture of her life: the married man, now known exclusively as Dickhead, on whom she’d wasted her best twelve years of marriageability, waiting for Dickhead’s kids to finish high school, so that he could leave his wife, which he’d then done, but for somebody younger than Abigail; the straight-man-disdaining sort of gay men to whom she’d turned for more agreeable male companionship; the impressively large community of underemployed actors and playwrights and comics and performance artists of which she was clearly a valued and generous member; the circle of friends who circularly bought tickets to each other’s shows and fund-raisers, much of the money ultimately trickling down from sources such as Joyce’s checkbook; the life, neither glamorous nor outstanding but nevertheless admirable and essential to New York’s functioning, of the bohemian. Patty was honestly happy to see that Abigail had found a place for herself in the world. It wasn’t until they repaired to her apartment for a “digestif,” and Patty broached the subject of Edgar and Galina, that things got ugly.

“Have you been to the Kibbutz of New Jersey yet?” Abigail said. “Have you seen their milch cow?”

“No, I’m going out there tomorrow,” Patty said.

“If you’re lucky, Galina won’t remember to take the collar and leash off Edgar before you get there, it’s such a verrrry handsome look. Very manly and religious. You can definitely bet she won’t bother washing the cow shit off the kitchen floor.”

Patty here explained her proposal, which was that Joyce sell the estate, give half the proceeds to Ray’s brothers, and divide the rest among Abigail, Veronica, Edgar, and herself (i.e., Joyce, not Patty, whose financial interest was nugatory). Abigail shook her head continuously while Patty explained it. “To begin with,” she said, “did Mommy not tell you about Galina’s accident? She hit a school crossing guard in a crosswalk. Thank God no children, just the old man in his orange vest. She was distracted by her spawn, in the back seat, and plowed straight into him. This was only about two years ago, and, of course, she and Edgar had let their car insurance lapse, because that’s the way she and Edgar are. Never mind New Jersey state law, never mind that even Daddy had car insurance. Edgar didn’t see the need for it, and Galina, despite living here for fifteen years, said everything was different in Rrrrussia, she had no idea. The school’s insurance paid the crosswalk guard, who basically can’t walk now, but the insurance company has a claim on all their assets, up to some ungodly sum. Any money they get now goes straight to the insurance company.”

Joyce, interestingly, had not mentioned this to Patty.

“Well, that’s probably as it should be,” she said. “If the guy is crippled, that’s where the money should go. Right?”

“It still means they run away to Israel, since they’re penniless. Which is fine with me-sayonara! But good luck selling that to Mommy. She’s fonder of the spawn than I am.”

“So why is this a problem for you?”

“Because,” Abigail said, “Edgar and Galina shouldn’t get a share at all, because they’ve had the use of the estate for six years and pretty well trashed it, and because the money’s just going to vanish anyway. Don’t you think it should go to people who can actually use it?”

“It sounds like the crossing guard could use it.”

“He’s been paid off. It’s just the insurance company now, and companies have insurance for these things themselves.”

Patty frowned.

“As for the uncles,” Abigail said, “I say tough tittie. They were sort of like you-they ran away. They didn’t have to have Granddaddy farting up every holiday like we did. Daddy went over there practically every week, his whole life, and ate Grandmommy’s nasty stale Pecan Sandies. I sure don’t remember seeing his brothers doing that.”

“You’re saying you think we deserve to be paid for that.”

“Why not? It’s better than not being paid. The uncles don’t need the money anyway. They’re doing verrrrry well without it. Whereas for me, and for Ronnie, it would make a real difference.”

“Oh, Abigail!” Patty burst out. “We’re never going to get along, are we.”

Perhaps catching a hint of pity in her voice, Abigail pulled a stupid-face, a mean face. “I’m not the one that ran away,” she said. “I’m not the one who turned her nose up, and could never take a joke, and married Mr. Superhuman Good Guy Minnesotan Righteous Weirdo Naturelover, and didn’t even pretend not to hate us. You think you’re doing so well, you think you’re so superior, and now Mr. Superhuman Good Guy’s dumped you for some inexplicable reason that obviously has nothing to do with your sterling personal qualities, and you think you can come back and be Miss Lovable-Congenial Goodwill Ambassador Florence Nightingale. It’s all verrrry interesting.”

Patty made sure to take several deep breaths before replying to this. “Like I said,” she said, “I don’t think you and I are ever going to get along.”

“The whole reason I have to call Mommy every day,” Abigail said, “is that you’re out there trying to wreck everything. I’ll stop bothering her the minute you go away and mind your own business. Is that a deal?”

“In what way is it not my business?”

“You said yourself you don’t care about the money. If you want to take a share and give it to the uncles, fine. If that helps you feel more superior and righteous, fine. But don’t tell us what to do.”

“OK,” Patty said, “I think we’re almost done here. Just-so I’m sure I’m understanding this-you think that by taking things from Ray and Joyce you’ve been doing them a favor all your life? You think Ray was doing his parents a favor by taking things? And that you deserve to be paid for all these great favors?”

Abigail made another peculiar face and appeared to consider this. “Yes, actually!” she said. “You actually put that pretty well. That is what I think. And the fact that it obviously seems strange to you is the reason you don’t have any business messing with this. You’re no more part of the family than Galina at this point. You just still seem to think you are. So why don’t you leave Mommy alone and let her make her own decisions. I don’t want you talking to Ronnie, either.”

“It’s not actually your business whether I talk to her.”

“It is so my business, and I’m telling you to leave her alone. You’ll just get her confused.”

“This is the person whose IQ is, like, one-eighty?”

“She’s not doing well since Daddy died, and there’s no reason to go tormenting her. I doubt you’ll listen to me, but I know what I’m talking about, having spent approximately a thousand times more time with Ronnie than you have. Try to be a little considerate.”

The once-manicured old Emerson estate, when Patty went out there the next morning, looked like some cross between Walker Evans and nineteenth-century Russia. A cow was standing in the middle of the tennis court, now netless, its plastic boundary lines torn and twisted. Edgar was plowing up the old horse pasture with a little tractor, slowing to a standstill every fifty feet or so when the tractor bogged down in the rain-soaked spring soil. He was wearing a muddy white shirt and mud-caked rubber boots; he’d put on a lot of fat and muscle and somehow reminded Patty of Pierre in War and Peace. He left the tractor tilting severely in the field and waded over through mud to the driveway where she’d parked. He explained that he was putting in potatoes, lots of potatoes, in a bid to make his family more perfectly self-sufficient in the coming year. Currently, it being spring, with last year’s harvest and venison supplies exhausted, the family was relying heavily on food gifts from the Congregation Beit Midrash: on the ground outside the barn door were cartons of canned goods, wholesale quantities of dry cereal, and shrink-wrapped flats of baby food. Some of the flats were opened and partly depleted, giving Patty the impression that the food had been standing in the elements for some time without being carried into the barn.

Although the house was a mess of toys and unwashed dishes and did indeed smell faintly of manure, the Renoir pastel and the Degas sketch and the Monet canvas were still hanging where they always had. Patty was immediately handed a nice, warm, adorable, not terribly clean one-year-old by Galina, who was very pregnant and surveyed the scene with dull sharecropper eyes. Patty had met Galina on the day of Ray’s memorial service but had barely spoken to her. She was one of those overwhelmed mothers engulfed in baby, her hair disordered, her cheeks hectic, her clothes disarranged, her flesh escaping haphazardly, but she clearly could still have been pretty if she’d had a few minutes to spare for it. “Thank you for coming to see us,” she said. “It’s an ordeal for us to travel now, arranging rides and so forth.”

Patty, before she could proceed with her business, had to enjoy the little boy in her arms, rub noses with him, get him laughing. She had the mad thought that she could adopt him, lighten Galina and Edgar’s load, and embark on a new kind of life. As if recognizing this in her, he put her hands all over her face, pulling at her features gleefully.

“He likes his aunt,” Galina said. “His long-lost aunt Patty.”

Edgar came in through the back door minus his boots, wearing thick gray socks that were themselves muddy and had holes in them. “Do you want some raisin bran or something?” he said. “We also have Chex.”

Patty declined and sat down at the kitchen table, her nephew on her knee. The other kids were no less great-dark-eyed, curious, bold without being rude-and she could see why Joyce was so taken with them and didn’t want them leaving the country. All in all, after her bad talk with Abigail, Patty was having a hard time seeing this family as the villains. They seemed, instead, literally, like babes in the woods. “So tell me how you guys see the future working out,” she said.

Edgar, obviously accustomed to letting Galina speak for him, sat picking scabs of mud off his socks while she explained that they were getting better at farming, that their rabbi and synagogue were wonderfully supportive, that Edgar was on the verge of being certified to produce kosher wine from the grandparental grapes, and that the game was amazing.

“Game?” Patty said.

“Deers,” Galina said. “Unbelievable numbers of deers. Edgar, how many did you shoot last fall?”

“Fourteen,” Edgar said.

“Fourteen on our property! And they keep coming and coming, it’s stupendous.”

“See, the thing is, though,” Patty said, trying to remember whether eating deer was even kosher, “it’s not really your property. It’s kind of Joyce’s now. And I’m just wondering, since Edgar’s so smart about business, whether it might make more sense for him to go back to work, and get a real income going, so that Joyce can make her own decision about this place.”

Galina was shaking her head adamantly. “There’s the insurances. The insurances want to take anything he makes, up to I don’t know how many hundred thousands.”

“Yes, well, but if Joyce could sell this place, you guys could pay off the insurances, I mean the insurance companies, and then you could get a fresh start.”

“That man is a fraudster!” Galina said with blazing eyes. “You heard the story, I guess? That crossing guard is one hundred percent guaranteed fraudster. I barely tapped him, barely touched him, and now he can’t walk?”

“Patty,” Edgar said, sounding remarkably much like Ray when he was being patronizing, “you really don’t understand the situation.”

“I’m sorry-what’s not to understand?”

“Your father wanted the farm to stay in the family,” Galina said. “He didn’t want it going in pockets of disgusting, obscene theater producers making so-called ‘art,’ or five-hundred-dollar psychiatrists who take your little sister’s money without ever making her better. This way, we always have the farm, your uncles will forget about it, and if there’s ever real need, instead of disgusting so-called ‘art’ or fraudster psychiatrists, Joyce can always sell part of it.”

“Edgar?” Patty said. “Is this your plan, too?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Well, I guess it’s very selfless of you. Guarding the flame of Daddy’s wishes.”

Galina leaned into Patty’s face, as if to aid her comprehension. “We have the children,” she said. “We’ll soon have six mouths to feed. Your sisters think I want to go to Israel-I don’t want to go to Israel. We have good life here. And don’t you think we get credit for having the children your sisters won’t have?”

“They do seem like fun kids,” Patty admitted. Her nephew was dozing in her arms.

“So leave it alone,” Galina said. “Come and see the children whenever you want. We’re not bad people, we’re not kooks, we love having visitors.”

Patty drove back to Westchester, feeling sad and discouraged, and consoled herself with televised basketball (Joyce was up in Albany). The following afternoon, she returned to the city and saw Veronica, the baby of the family, the most damaged of them all. There had always been something otherworldly about Veronica. For a long time, it had had to do with her dark-eyed, slender, wood-sprite looks, to which she’d adapted in various self-destructive ways including anorexia, promiscuity, and hard drinking. Now her looks were mostly gone-she was heavier but not heavy like a fat person; she reminded Patty of her former friend Eliza, whom she’d once glimpsed, many years after college, in a crowded DMV office-and her otherworldliness was more spiritual: a nonconnection to ordinary logic, a sort of checked-out amusement regarding the existence of a world outside herself. She’d once shown great promise (at least in Joyce’s view) as both a painter and a ballerina, and had been hit on and dated by any number of worthy young men, but she’d since been bludgeoned by episodes of major depression beside which Patty’s own depressions were apparently autumn hayrides in an apple orchard. According to Joyce, she was currently employed as an administrative assistant at a dance company. She lived in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom on Ludlow Street where Patty, despite having phoned in advance, seemed to have interrupted her in some deep meditative exercise. She buzzed Patty in and left her front door ajar, leaving it to Patty to find her in her bedroom, on a yoga mat, wearing faded Sarah Lawrence gym clothes; her youthful dancer’s limberness had developed into a quite astonishing yogic flexibility. She obviously wished that Patty hadn’t come, and Patty had to sit on her bed for half an hour, waiting eons for responses to her basic pleasantries, before Veronica finally reconciled herself to her sister’s presence. “Those are great boots,” she said.

“Oh, thank you.”

“I don’t wear leather anymore, but sometimes, when I see a good boot, I still miss it.”

“Uh huh,” Patty said encouragingly.

“Do you mind if I smell them?”

“My boots?”

Veronica nodded and crawled over to inhale the smell of the uppers. “I’m very sensitive to smell,” she said, her eyes closed blissfully. “It’s the same with bacon-I still love the smell, even though I don’t eat it. It’s so intense for me, it’s almost like eating it.”

“Uh huh,” Patty encouraged.

“In terms of my practice, it’s literally like not having my cake and not eating it, too.”

“Right. I can see that. That’s interesting. Although presumably you never ate leather.”

Veronica laughed hard at this and for a while became quite sisterly. Unlike anyone else in the family, except Ray, she had a lot of questions about Patty’s life and the turns that it had lately taken. She found cosmically funny precisely the most painful parts of Patty’s story, and once Patty got used to her laughing at the wreck of her marriage, she could see that it did Veronica good to hear of her troubles. It seemed to confirm some family truth for her and put her at ease. But then, over green tea, which Veronica averred she drank at least a gallon of per day, Patty brought up the matter of the estate, and her sister’s laughter became vaguer and more slippery.

“Seriously,” Patty said. “Why are you bothering Joyce about the money? If it was just Abigail bothering her, I think she could deal with it, but coming from you, too, it’s making her really uncomfortable.”

“I don’t think Mommy needs my help to make her uncomfortable,” Veronica said, amused. “She does pretty well with that on her own.”

“Well, you’re making her more uncomfortable.”

“I don’t think so. I think we make our own heaven and hell. If she wants to be less uncomfortable, she can sell the estate. All I’m asking for is enough money so I don’t have to work.”

“What’s wrong with working?” Patty said, hearing an echo of a similar question that Walter had once asked her. “It’s good for the self-esteem to work.”

“I can work,” Veronica said. “I’m working now. I’d just rather not. It’s boring, and they treat me like a secretary.”

“You are a secretary. You’re probably the highest-IQ secretary in New York City.”

“I just look forward to quitting, that’s all.”

“I’m sure Joyce would pay for you to go back to school and get some job more suitable for your talents.”

Veronica laughed. “My talents don’t seem to be the kind the world’s interested in. That’s why it’s better if I can exercise them by myself. I really just want to be left alone, Patty. That’s all I’m asking at this point. To be left alone. Abigail’s the one who doesn’t want Uncle Jim and Uncle Dudley to get anything. I don’t really care as long as I can pay my rent.”

“That’s not what Joyce says. She says you don’t want them getting anything, either.”

“I’m only trying to help Abigail get what she wants. She wants to start her own female comedy troupe and take it to Europe, where people will appreciate her. She wants to live in Rome and be revered.” Again the laugh. “And I’d actually be fine with that. I don’t need to see her that much. She’s nice to me, but you know the way she talks. I always end up feeling, at the end of an evening with her, like it would have been better to spend the evening alone. I like being alone. I’d rather be able to think my thoughts without being distracted.”

“So you’re tormenting Joyce because you don’t want to see so much of Abigail? Why don’t you just not see so much of Abigail?”

“Because I’ve been told that it’s not good to see no one. She’s sort of like TV playing in the background. It keeps me company.”

“But you just said you don’t even like to see her!”

“I know. It’s hard to explain. I have a friend in Brooklyn I’d probably see more of if I didn’t see so much of Abigail. That would probably be OK, too. Actually, when I think about it, I’m pretty sure it would be OK.” And Veronica laughed at the thought of this friend.

“But why shouldn’t Edgar feel the same way you do?” Patty said. “Why shouldn’t he and Galina get to keep living on the farm?”

“Probably no reason. You’re probably right. Galina is undeniably appalling, and I think Edgar knows it, I think that’s why he married her-to inflict her on us. She’s his revenge for being the only boy in the family. And I personally don’t really care as long as I don’t have to see her, but Abigail can’t get over it.”

“So basically you’re doing this all for Abigail.”

“She wants things. I don’t want things myself, but I’m happy to help her try to get them.”

“Except you do want enough money so you never have to work.”

“Yes, that would definitely be nice. I don’t like being someone’s secretary. I especially hate answering the phone.” She laughed. “I think people talk too much in general.”

Patty felt like she was dealing with a huge ball of Bazooka that she couldn’t get ungummed from her fingers; the strands of Veronica’s logic were boundlessly elastic and adhered not only to Patty but to themselves.

Later, as she rode the train back out of the city, she was struck, as never before, by how much better off and more successful her parents were than any of their children, herself included, and how odd it was that none of the kids had inherited one speck of the sense of social responsibility that had motivated Joyce and Ray all their lives. She knew that Joyce felt guilty about it, especially about poor Veronica, but she also knew that it must have been a terrible blow to Joyce’s ego to have such unflattering children, and that Joyce probably blamed Ray’s genes, the curse of old August Emerson, for her kids’ weirdness and ineffectuality. It occurred to Patty, then, that Joyce’s political career hadn’t just caused or aggravated her family’s problems: it had also been her escape from those problems. In retrospect, Patty saw something poignant or even admirable in Joyce’s determination to absent herself, to be a politician and do good in the world, and thereby save herself. And, as somebody who’d likewise taken extreme steps to save herself, Patty could see that Joyce wasn’t just lucky to have a daughter like her: that she was also lucky to have had a mother like Joyce.

There was still one big thing she didn’t understand, though, and when Joyce returned from Albany the following afternoon, full of anger at the senate Republicans who were paralyzing the state government (Ray, alas, no longer being around to rag Joyce about the Democrats’ own role in the paralysis), Patty was waiting in the kitchen with a question for her. She asked it as soon as Joyce had taken off her raincoat: “Why did you never go to any of my basketball games?”

“You’re right,” Joyce said immediately, as if she’d been expecting the question for thirty years. “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. I should have gone to more of your games.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Joyce reflected for a moment. “I can’t really explain it,” she said, “except to say that we had so many things going on, we couldn’t get to everything. We made mistakes as parents. You’ve probably made some yourself now. You can probably understand how confused everything gets, and how busy. What a struggle it is to get to everything.”

“Here’s the thing, though,” Patty said. “You did have time for other things. It was specifically my games that you weren’t going to. And I’m not talking about every game, I’m talking about any games.”

“Oh, why are you bringing this up now? I said I was sorry I made a mistake.”

“I’m not blaming you,” Patty said. “I’m asking because I was really good at basketball. I was really, really good. I’ve probably made more mistakes as a mother than you did, so this is not a criticism. I’m just thinking, it would have made you happy to see how good I was. To see how talented I was. It would have made you feel good about yourself.”

Joyce looked away. “I suppose I was never one for sports.”

“But you went to Edgar’s fencing meets.”

“Not many.”

“More than you went to my games. And it’s not like you liked fencing so much. And it’s not like Edgar was any good.”

Joyce, whose self-control was ordinarily perfect, went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine that Patty had nearly killed the night before. She poured the remainder in a juice glass, drank half of it, laughed at herself, and drank the other half.

“I don’t know why your sisters aren’t doing better,” she said, in an apparent non sequitur. “But Abigail said an interesting thing to me once. A terrible thing, which still tears me up. I shouldn’t tell you, but somehow I trust you not to talk about these things. Abigail was very… inebriated. This was a long time ago, when she was still trying to be a stage actress. There was an excellent role that she’d thought she was going to be cast in, but hadn’t been. And I tried to encourage her, and tell her I believed in her talents, and she just had to keep trying. And she said the most terrible thing to me. She said that I was the reason she’d failed. I who had been nothing, nothing, nothing but supportive. But that’s what she said.”

“Did she explain that?”

“She said…” Joyce looked woefully out into her flower garden. “She said the reason she couldn’t succeed was that, if she ever did succeed, then I would take it from her. It would be my success, not hers. Which isn’t true! But this is how she felt. And the only way she had to show me how she felt, and make me keep suffering, and not let me think that everything was OK with her, was to keep on not succeeding. Oh, I still hate to think about it! I told her it wasn’t true, and I hope she believed me, because it is not true.”

“OK,” Patty said, “that does sound hard. But what does it have to do with my basketball games?”

Joyce shook her head. “I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”

“I was succeeding, Mommy. That’s the weird thing. I was totally succeeding.”

Here, all at once, Joyce’s face crumpled up terribly. She shook her head again, as if with repugnance, trying to hold back tears. “I know you were,” she said. “I should have been there. I blame myself.”

“It’s really OK that you weren’t. Maybe almost better, in the long run. I was just asking a curious question.”

Joyce’s summation, after a long silence, was: “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”

And this was all Patty got from her, then or later. It wasn’t a lot, it didn’t solve any mysteries, but it would have to do. That same evening, Patty presented the results of her investigations and proposed a plan of action that Joyce, with much docile nodding, agreed to every detail of. The estate would be sold, and Joyce would give half the proceeds to Ray’s brothers, administer Edgar’s share of the remainder in a trust from which he and Galina could draw enough to live on (provided they didn’t emigrate), and offer large lump sums to Abigail and Veronica. Patty, who ended up accepting $75,000 to help start a new life without assistance from Walter, felt fleetingly guilty on Walter’s behalf, thinking of the empty woods and untilled fields that she’d helped doom to fragmentation and development. She hoped Walter might understand that the collective unhappiness of the bobolinks and woodpeckers and orioles whose homes she had wrecked was not much greater, in this particular instance, than that of the family that was selling the land.

And the autobiographer will say this about her family: the money they’d waited so long for, and been so uncivil about, wasn’t wholly wasted on them. Abigail in particular began to flourish as soon as she had some financial weight to throw around in her bohemia; Joyce now calls Patty whenever Abigail’s name is in the Times again; she and her troupe are apparently the toast of Italy, Slovenia, and other European nations. Veronica gets to be alone in her apartment, in an upstate ashram, and in her studio, and it’s possible that her paintings, despite how ingrown and never-quite-finished they look to Patty, will be hailed by later generations as works of genius. Edgar and Galina have relocated to the ultra-Orthodox community in Kiryas Joel, New York, where they’ve had one last (fifth) baby and don’t seem to be causing active harm to anybody. Patty sees all of them except Abigail a few times a year. Her nephews and nieces are the main treat, of course, but she also recently accompanied Joyce on a British garden tour that she enjoyed more than she’d thought she might, and she and Veronica never fail to have some laughs.

Mainly, though, she leads her own little life. She still runs every day, in Prospect Park, but she’s no longer addicted to exercise or to anything else, really. A bottle of wine lasts two days now, sometimes three. At her school, she’s in the blessed position of not having to deal directly with today’s parents, who are way more insane and pressurized than even she had been. They seem to think her school should be helping their first-graders write early drafts of their college application essays and build their vocabulary for the SAT, ten years in the future. But Patty gets to deal with the kids purely as kids-as interesting and mostly still untainted little individuals who are eager to acquire writing skills, so as to be able to tell their stories. Patty meets with them in small groups and encourages them to do this, and they’re not so young that some of them might not remember Mrs. Berglund when they’re grown up. The middle-school kids should definitely remember her, because this is her favorite part of her job: giving back, as a coach, the total dedication and tough love and lessons in teamwork that her own coaches once gave her. Almost every day of the school year, after class, for a few hours, she gets to disappear and forget herself and be one of the girls again, be wedded by love to the cause of winning games, and yearn pureheartedly for her players to succeed. A universe that permits her to do this, at this relatively late point in her life, in spite of her not having been the best person, cannot be a wholly cruel one.

Summers are harder, no question. Summers are when the old self-pity and competitiveness well up in her again. Patty twice forced herself to volunteer with the city parks department and work outdoors with kids, but she turns out to be shockingly bad at managing boys older than six or seven, and it’s a struggle to interest herself in activity purely for activity’s sake; she needs a real team, her own team, to discipline and focus on winning. The younger unmarried women teachers at her school, who are hilariously hard partyers (like, puking-in-the-bathroom hard partyers, tequila-drinks-in-the-conference-room-at-three-o’clock hard partyers), become scarce in the summer, and there are only so many hours a person can read books by herself, or clean her tiny and already clean apartment while listening to country music, without wanting to do some hard partying of her own. The two sort-of relationships she had with significantly younger men from her school, two semi-sustained dating things that the reader surely doesn’t want to hear about and in any case consisted mainly of awkwardness and tortured discussion, both began in the summer months. For the last three years, Cathy and Donna have kindly let her spend all of July in Wisconsin.

Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. So much so, indeed, that Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother’s life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she’d also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica’s overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was “Great post!!” When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who’d dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica’s belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty’s age. And when Jessica’s heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation-the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding-but mostly because she depends on Jessica’s love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.

One indisputable boon of her and Walter’s separation has been to bring their kids closer together. In the months after Patty left Washington, she could tell, from their both being party to information that she’d given only one of them, that they were in regular communication, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the substance of their communication was how destructive and selfish and embarrassing their parents were. Even after Jessica forgave Walter and Patty, she remained in close touch with her war buddy, having bonded with him in the trenches.

How the two siblings have negotiated the sharp contrasts between their personalities has been interesting for Patty to watch, given her own failures in this line. Joey seems to have been especially insightful regarding the duplicity of Jessica’s little drummer boy, explaining certain things to her which Patty had found it politic not to. It also definitely helps that Joey, since he had to be brilliantly successful at something, has been flourishing in a business that Jessica approves of. Not that there aren’t still things for Jessica to roll her eyes at and be competitive about. It rankles her that Walter, with his South American connections, was able to steer Joey into shade-grown coffee at exactly the moment when fortunes could be made in it, while there is nothing that either Walter or Patty can do to help Jessica in her own chosen career of literary publishing. It frustrates her to be devoted, like her father, to a declining and endangered and unprofitable enterprise while Joey gets rich almost effortlessly. Nor can she conceal her envy of Connie for getting to travel the world with Joey, getting to visit precisely those humid countries that she herself is most multiculturally enthusiastic about. But Jessica does, albeit grudgingly, admire Connie’s shrewdness in delaying having babies; she’s also been heard to admit that Connie dresses pretty well “for a midwesterner.” And there is no getting around the fact that shade-grown coffee is better for the environment, better especially for birds, and that Joey deserves credit for trumpeting this fact and marketing it astutely. Joey has Jessica pretty well beaten, in other words, and this is yet another reason why Patty works so hard to be her friend.

The autobiographer wishes she could report that all is well with her and Joey, too. Alas, all is not. Joey still presents a steel door to Patty, a door cooler and harder than ever, a door that she knows will remain closed until she can prove to him that she’s accepted Connie. And, alas, though Patty has made great strides in many areas, learning to love Connie isn’t one of them. That Connie sedulously checks every box of good daughter-in-lawship only makes things worse. Patty can feel in her bones that Connie doesn’t actually like her any more than she likes Connie. There is something about Connie’s way with Joey, something relentlessly possessive and competitive and exclusive, something not right, that makes Patty’s hair stand on end. Although she wants to become a better person in every way, she has sadly begun to realize that this ideal may very well be unattainable, and that her failure will always stand between her and Joey, and be her lasting punishment for the mistakes she made with him. Joey, needless to say, is scrupulously polite to Patty. He calls her once a week and remembers the names of her co-workers and her favorite students; he extends and sometimes accepts invitations; he tosses her such small scraps of attention as his loyalty to Connie permits. In the last two years, he’s gone so far as to repay, with interest, the money she sent to him in college-money that she needs too much, both practically and emotionally, to say no to. But his inner door is locked against her, and she can’t imagine how it will ever open again.

Or actually, to be precise, she can imagine only one way, which the autobiographer fears her reader won’t want to hear about but which she will mention anyway. She can imagine that, if she could somehow be with Walter again, and feel secure in his love again, and get up from their warm bed in the morning and go back to it at night knowing that she’s his again, she might finally forgive Connie and become sensible of the qualities that everybody else finds so appealing in her. She might enjoy sitting down at Connie’s dinner table, and her heart might be warmed by Joey’s loyalty and devotion to his wife, and Joey in turn might open the door for her a little bit, if only she could ride home from dinner afterward with Walter and rest her head on his shoulder and know she’s been forgiven. But of course this is a wildly unlikely scenario, and by no stretch of justice one that she deserves.

The autobiographer is fifty-two now and looks it. Her periods have lately been strange and irregular. Every year at tax time, it seems as if the year just past was shorter than the year before it; the years are becoming so similar to each other. She can imagine several discouraging reasons why Walter hasn’t divorced her-he might, for example, still hate her too much to put himself even minimally in contact with her-but her heart persists in taking courage from the fact that he hasn’t. She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there’s a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn’t want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there’s some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing. Having made so many mistakes in her life, she has every reason to assume she’s being unrealistic here, too: is failing to imagine some obvious fatal impediment to their getting back together. But the thought won’t leave her alone. It comes to her day after day, year after similar year, this yearning for his face and his voice and his anger and his kindness, this yearning for her mate.

And this is really all the autobiographer has to tell her reader, except to mention, in closing, what occasioned the writing of these pages. A few weeks ago, on Spring Street in Manhattan, on her way home from a bookstore reading by an earnest young novelist whom Jessica was excited to be publishing, Patty saw a tall middle-aged man striding toward her on the sidewalk and realized it was Richard Katz. His hair is short and gray now, and he wears glasses that make him weirdly distinguished, even though he still dresses like a late-seventies twenty-year-old. Seeing him in Lower Manhattan, where you can’t be as invisible as you can in deep Brooklyn, Patty was sensible of how old she herself must look now, how much like somebody’s irrelevant mother. If there’d been any way to hide, she would have hidden, to spare Richard the embarrassment of seeing her and herself the embarrassment of being his discarded sexual object. But she couldn’t hide, and Richard, with a familiar effortful decency, after some awkward hellos, offered to buy her a glass of wine.

In the bar where they alighted, Richard listened to Patty’s news of herself with the halved attention of a man who’s busy and successful. He seemed finally to have made peace with his success-he mentioned, without embarrassment or apology, that he’d done one of those avant-garde orchestral thingies for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that his current girlfriend, who is apparently a big-deal documentary-maker, had introduced him to various young directors of the kind of art-house movies that Walter always loved, and that some scoring projects were in the works. Patty allowed herself one small pang at how relatively contented he seemed, and another small pang at the thought of his high-powered girlfriend, before turning the subject, as always, to Walter.

“You’re not in touch with him at all,” Richard said.

“No,” she said. “It’s like some kind of fairy tale. We haven’t talked since the day I left Washington. Six years and not one word. I only hear about him from my kids.”

“Maybe you should call him.”

“I can’t, Richard. I missed my chance six years ago, and now I think he just wants to be left alone. He’s living at the lake house and doing work for the Nature Conservancy up there. If he wanted to be in touch, he could always call me.”

“Maybe he’s thinking the same thing about you.”

She shook her head. “I think everybody recognizes that he’s suffered more than I have. I don’t think anyone’s cruel enough to think it’s his job to call me. Plus I’ve already told Jessie, in so many words, that I’d like to see him again. I’d be shocked if she hadn’t passed that information along to him-there’s nothing she’d like better than to save the day. So he’s obviously still hurt, and angry, and hates you and me. And who can blame him, really?”

“I can, a little bit,” Richard said. “You remember how he gave me that silent treatment in college? That was bullshit. It’s bad for his soul. It’s the side of him I could never stand.”

“Well maybe you should call him.”

“No.” He laughed. “I did finally get around to making him a little present-you’ll see it in a couple of months if you keep your eye out. A little friendly shout across the time zones. But I’ve never had any kind of stomach for apologies. Whereas you.”

“Whereas I?”

He was already waving to the bar waitress for the check. “You know how to tell a story,” he said. “Why don’t you tell him a story?”