The Widow Waltz Read online

  “George, no.” Daniel gets up from his chair to rub my shoulders. The motion wakes Sadie, who starts to bark as he croons, “Better days ahead, darling. Better days. Calm down, please. Tell Danny. What can I do?”

  “Nothing.” Truly pathetic, I lose it. “You can’t do a fucking thing. The poor dead schmuck’s left me . . .” I gasp. Daniel hands me tissue after tissue, though the snot drips faster than I can mop it up. “He’s left me penniless. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  His face contorts. I know Daniel well enough to see that he is trying to decide to what degree I am exaggerating “But I thought you hadn’t had the reading of the will yet—or do they call it that only in B movies?”

  “I lied.” Sadie jumps upright, disturbed by my racket, and hustles for attention. “Ben’s lawyer met with us last week. Unless there’s been some cosmic bungle, in a few months you’ll be looking at a bag lady.” I stretch open my hands in front of me, then pet Sadie’s head. She’s not buying it, and whines.

  “Georgia, it’s beneath you to dramatize.”

  “I assure you, I’m not, if this lawyer is right, which I can’t believe he is.” More for my own sake than Daniel’s, I am trying to keep myself together, because if I release my emotions—anger, anxiety, humiliation, worthlessness, and sheer terror—there will be a flood.

  “Christ. Crap. Nothing?”

  “If I listen to the attorney, every one of my illusions has been dismantled. But I don’t believe him. I can’t. Ben would never do anything like this.”

  “You probably haven’t slept in weeks, poor baby. Anyone would be a wreck.” He opens a drawer and from a small vial counts out six white, pea-sized pills. “Ambien?”

  “Stop mothering me, Daniel. I don’t need better living through chemistry. Sleeping isn’t the problem.” For the last two nights, I’ve almost been in a coma. “Did you hear me? Virtually zero, that’s what the lawyer says.”

  “This is seismic. This is impossible.” Daniel rifles through the drawers again. Everyone needs one bad habit and cigarettes are his. He lights up and adds, “Do you mind?”

  “Do I look like a woman so flushed with her own importance she’s going to object to secondhand smoke?”

  “What happened?” he asks as he exhales. “George, honey, what the fuck? This is madness.”

  I shrug, smoothing Sadie’s back in long, slow strokes that match Daniel’s puffs. “I don’t know yet. The lawyer and I spoke this morning, and he reminded me it could take weeks—maybe months—to sort through every record. That’s for the ones he can find.”

  I am still trying for cool nonchalance, so Daniel responds with, “Are the lovelies aware of this puzzle?” He takes my measure.

  “They got the news bulletin but do they believe it? I doubt it. And who can blame them? I don’t believe it. When they’re around, I try to remember to act normal, whatever that is. Last night they went out together, to a club, so at least there’s that.” Luey might resent that Nicola was the first leaf on the family tree, but for the moment my daughters are a unified front. In Luey’s algebra I am still the X for which she solves in the extra-credit equation of her lifelong resentment.

  “What can we do?” Daniel’s voice trembles.

  “Is Stephan in this royal ‘we’?”

  “Come on, he’ll want to help, and you know I hate keeping secrets from him.”

  “Can this stay between us? Please? I have to work myself up to Stephan.”

  I stand, hug Daniel tightly, and turn to leave.

  “Forgive me if I sound disingenuous,” Daniel says as Sadie follows me. “I’m sure this lawyer will come through for you and in weeks you’ll have answers you can live with.”

  “Daniel, that’s not the kind of b.s. that’s going to be helpful.”

  “Then let’s start over,” he says. As his powerful hug begins, so do my tears. “I think you’re in shock. Whatever Ben did is crazy.”

  “Crazy,” I repeat. “Awful. Frightening.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  I am eight years older than Daniel but he holds me like a father, patting my back, murmuring nonsense words that don’t make sense and don’t need to, because what counts is that he is there for me, as a friend, a true friend.

  5.

  Luey wanted to turn on music, loud, but out of consideration for her mother she opted for earphones. In the last few weeks she’d been immeasurably sad, but today she felt angry and terrified, her body prickling. She, too, had secrets, so why wouldn’t Daddy? She’d always believed they were much alike, yet the possibility of concealment on his part felt like a betrayal.

  Last week, when they’d gotten back from the lawyer—a lamentable reptile pimped out down to his super-shined oxfords, which Nicola admired and said were John Lobb, English, and obscenely expensive—she wanted to go to her mother’s room and crawl into bed like she did the morning she flew back from Palo Alto. Georgia was the one Luey depended on for comfort, even when Luey rejected the notion. Luey wished she could turn back the clock to when everything was simpler, though she hadn’t realized it at the time.

  Her door opened. “Okay if I come in?” Nicola whispered.

  Her sister had no respect for boundaries, Luey thought. What’s hers is hers and what’s mine is hers. Cola sat on the edge of the bed, pushing aside a pair of leggings in a way that suggested they might be infectious. Her eyes were swollen, Luey noticed as she thought how this made them even more deep set than usual, adding to Nicola’s striptease exoticism. Say what you want about her, she grew up to be a lot prettier than Luey predicted.

  “I saw your light on.” It was close to two a.m.

  If Nicola got chummy, Luey got wary. When Luey was seven, the big thrill was having a sleepover in Nicola’s bedroom. Luey would be the one to knock on her sister’s door, shouting, “Hola, Cola.” Daddy would tell stories starring pigeons named Loofa and Mazola. Mommy would call them the giggle queens and bring breakfast in bed, cinnamon toast and grape jelly. Talk about the sweet life. Things were still good when they were eleven and twelve; often, Luey remembered, they’d go into the kitchen and make popcorn or fudge. But now Nicola had turned into the sort of woman Luey would never strike up a conversation with, even at a party: overly groomed, overly careful.

  “What’s on your mind?” Luey asked.

  As the words slipped out, Luey realized they were asinine. In this home, what could be on anyone’s mind?

  “I’m scared,” Nicola said. “And nervous.” She held her hands to show nails gnawed to the quick. “I’m worried about Mother, mostly.”

  Boo-hoo—it’s yourself you’re stressed out about, Bad Luey thought. You might have to actually get a permanent job. Then Good Luey came out like a tornado on the Fujita scale and thought the same of herself. Plenty of Luey’s friends earned money—in Stanford’s video labs or libraries, tutoring, babysitting, or offering themselves up as research guinea pigs. Their own father had tended bar. Luey had never earned a dime. Summers had been R & R disguised as line items for her college applications.

  “I’m worried about Mommy, too.” She knew it annoyed Nicola when she called her Mommy.

  “It would help to get through this if we were together,” Nicola said. Luey nodded in agreement. “You think the money will turn up?”

  “Definitely,” Luey said. “I don’t trust that lawyer. Daddy was too smart to fuck up totally.”

  Then Luey thought of two years ago when their father had hung out with them one night and smoked grass, which is what he called it. He started telling a story—he always took you right there, made you practically pee in your pants—about how he was a dealer in Providence and scored close to a hundred bucks a week, which he explained was a lot of money back then. The evening turned into a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. Her father hadn’t realized their mother was right outside the
door, seeing and smelling everything. She went ballistic, called him a child—and that was the civil term. Her father had paid for his sin by sleeping on the couch. She hated to think of her father as a fool then and she hated it now.

  That night, in a sororal cease-fire, Nicola slept on Luey’s floor. In the morning when Luey checked Twitter, she’d been retweeted: RT @feralkitty: Every woman has a dark side she never shows to anybody.

  6.

  Watching my daughters eat breakfast, I see them twenty years ago, Nicola in Pippi Longstocking braids and school kilt, Louisa all glitter and glow, a baby rock star.

  While Nicola is leaning against the counter, sipping sensible green tea, Luey is downing sugary cereal, a brand I did not buy. “What?” she says when she catches my glance. “I’m eating it with Greek yogurt.”

  “Don’t forget we’re seeing Nana today,” I say as I measure coffee. “At noon.”

  Twice a week, I visit my mother in a groomed, green enclave midway between her former Philadelphia home and mine, a spot of New Jersey under the radar of comedians, Soprano aficionados, and Springsteen fans. Although Camille Waltz’s grasp of time has become so tentative that I am willing to believe she has not noticed my absence, my guilt is encroaching. I need to be with my mother, though I will require every minute of the hour-long ride to warm up to the assault of seeing the faux mother who occupies her sarcophagus.

  “I’d like you two to join me,” I tell Luey and Nicola.

  “I have cardio jazz at one.” Cereal crunches as Luey speaks.

  “I was meeting Jamie but I guess I can change it,” Nicola replies.

  “I’d be grateful, Cola,” I say, and hope the statement isn’t edged with the sarcasm I feel. “And who’s Jamie?”

  “No one special.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Like I said. Not special.”

  Luey swats her sister on the derriere as she dumps her soggy cereal into the trash. “That’s not how it sounded the other night.”

  Nicola tosses a napkin in her direction. “Skank,” she hisses, in the not altogether unkind way sisters can shoot an arrow.

  “I’ll take the class another day,” Luey’s back says.

  She is doing this for her nana, not me. In the presence of her grandmother I see the best of Luey. Camille and Luey, separated at birth, Ben would say. Separated by me.

  “Please be ready in forty-five minutes.” I page through the newspaper, going straight to the obits—my new fixation—then take my coffee along to prepare for today’s persecution. Camille Waltz is still able to spot a pill in a sweater at twenty paces. I dress accordingly.

  The three of us are standing where we park our car, in the costly but convenient dungeon beneath our building. Today is Fred’s day off. Tomorrow I will give him a severance check, a gushing reference letter, and a “Oh how we will all miss you!” note that is waiting in my desk drawer, knowing it is insufficient compensation for losing his job.

  “Can I drive?” Luey asks, as I unlock the door.

  I relinquish the keys as a peace offering, though I am always happy getting behind the wheel and becoming a rolling body in a simple right-left-straight-reverse universe of navigation, acceleration, and stops. “Be my guest,” I say and climb into the passenger’s seat. I hand each daughter a bottle of water and put my own in its designated receptacle.

  Nicola reaches forward from the back to nuzzle me around the neck. “Georgia Waltz, always prepared,” she says.

  If only. And then I say it aloud. Both girls laugh, and Nicola adds, “It’s going to be okay.” I do not want to know if she is referring to today’s excursion or the rest of my life.

  Whoever’s in the driver’s seat chooses the music—our Silver-Waltz rule. If Luey goes with hip-hop, I will tell her that I’ve grown to like the poetry and cadence, not to appease her but because it’s true. She turns, however, to Frank Sinatra, who starts crooning a ballad as mellow as cognac in a sidecar. “Nana’s day,” she says. “Nana’s songs.”

  We drive without conversation, I for one, thanking God for Mr. Sinatra. Maybe this afternoon will be different, which is a wish I make before each visit. The familiar yearning simmers with the hope that my only living parent will feel sufficient and appropriate outrage at the injustice done to her daughter. No husband drops dead and stiffs Camille Waltz’s child! No son-in-law does that to her baby! My mother will fold me into her arms and, while smoothing my hair, drop pearls of wisdom I will use to pave my way to a safer place. I allow myself to float on crazy thoughts as I ignore ugly Jersey, with entire stores devoted to laminate kitchen tables and cheesy party goods, until we turn into a residential area zoned for acreage generous enough for polo games. With its circular drive and meticulously raked grounds, you’d expect The Oaks to be studded with lacrosse sticks, not walkers. Daniel refers to the institution as “the finishing school.” Which it is.

  For five years after the death of my father, my mother stayed on in Philadelphia, eventually tended to by a round-the-clock entourage. When it became too hard to manage the moving parts of this puzzle—unannounced journeys, mysterious no-shows, outrage when a previous shift left behind an unwashed dish—Stephan and I, in a rare show of filial togetherness, searched for a “facility,” hoping to find one jauntier than that word suggests.

  Only Daniel wondered aloud why neither of us invited our mother to live in our own home. “Easy for the orphan boy to say,” Stephan responded. Daniel’s parents were killed in a head-on collision when he was fourteen. He was raised by an aunt and uncle.

  “Beast,” Daniel responded.

  “If I’m a beast, I’d happily be a satyr,” Stephan replied.

  “Stay on point,” I said. I could have invited my mother to take over one of the girls’ bedrooms if I had not known that in one month’s time I’d be devoured by Camille’s custom brand of rebuke. It’s no coincidence that on the Monday following every Thanksgiving, where she was always present, I escaped to ski or hike, after which I allowed myself to be pummeled with hot stones and swaddled with herb-scented towels. I felt I had earned the indulgence.

  Camille Waltz’s current residence comes with exorbitant fees because the place doesn’t reek of urine and sadness. The Oaks is a cruise ship docked on dry, well-tended Garden State soil where you can join a choir, study French, prattle on in a book club, paint your portrait, fox-trot, or play eight hours of daily duplicate bridge until the others boot you out of the game. You can do any of these things if your mind isn’t now frayed wires mated with missed connections. My mother can sit in a chair, sway grandly down the hall, feed herself, and stare at a television. Some days she knows me for as long as twenty minutes.

  At least it is Mallomars season. Today I’m bringing six boxes, realizing that even in this swankiest of joints, I’ll be lucky if one winds up staying in my mother’s room. It’s not the staff I’m accusing of theft but residents who, in the argot of The Oaks, are “ambulatory,” trolling for treats they liberate from other residents.

  Nicola grabs the cookies. I carry a tote with a new flannel nightgown and six pairs of fuzzy socks that my mother would loudly reject if she realized that the feet that would soon wear them were her own. Under my arm is a nosegay of ranunculus, each blossom like a vest-pocket peony. Luey carries gifts for the staff, fancy teas and dozens of doughnuts gaudy with sprinkles. As we enter, we resemble well-dressed peddlers.

  “Hello, Jessie.”

  “Mizz Waltz,” she answers. “You here to see Mom? You go on back now, you and your beautiful girls. What a sight you are.”

  We greet residents who are well enough to roam, turn right at the fake Cezanne and the locked door, and get buzzed into dementiaville, where yesterday is more present than today. Here you can be a once-haughty woman of seventy-seven and yet the epitaph on the door to your room will announce: CAMILLE WALTZ OF PHILADELPHIA. MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER. LOVES KNITTING,
POLITICS, AGATHA CHRISTIE AND RED ROSES. The anonymous author of that living obituary might have added vodka gimlets, golf, and her granddaughter Louisa. Then Stephan. Then Ben. Then me.

  “Nana!” Nicola crosses into the dim room. My mother is dozing in an armchair brought from home, while chintz butterflies circle cottage posies on scarlet fabric faded to rose. Her feet, still narrow and elegant, shod in black velvet slippers, are daintily crossed at the ankles, propped on an ottoman. She ignores Nicola, who gently places a hand on her grandmother’s arm. Once well-toned, a star tennis player, my mother looks as though she’s been put in the washing machine on a steam cycle and has emerged shrunken, creased, and limp.

  “We’ve brought you your Mallomars,” Luey says. Perhaps it’s her younger granddaughter’s songlike voice, a version of my own untouched by an early decade of cigarettes, that does it. My mother opens her eyes and, in a gesture I have seen thousands of times, brings her hand to her forehead to brush away locks that might have escaped from her disciplined coiffure. That hair used to be thick, lustrous, and sable brown, inflated and lacquered into a bouffant inspired by Jackie Kennedy, her muse. As Jackie morphed into Jackie O, Camille changed, too, allowing her hair to grow longer and looser. When Jackie died, so did my mother’s imagination. For the last fifteen years she’s been stuck with Editor Jackie, the version with blazers, trousers, and Hermès scarves, squired by Maurice Templeton, who, my mother never failed to point out with pride, was Jewish. Her kind: not too.

  In Mother’s first year at The Oaks, I booked her appointments at the hair salon, but as she grew increasingly rattled, the exercise seemed cruel. Now I keep her Jackie hair shorn. With the dye grown out, silvery whirls shine like well-used cutlery. When Mother looks in a mirror, I doubt she can place the woman with the wide-set brown eyes and broad smile, but I like this rebranded version with slightly less ability to lacerate.