“And now Clark has the right, too,” Cindy went on, looking blankly ahead as her voice quivered. “He’s got every … single right to love me far less than he loves his work. He’s got every right to toss me aside, pick me up when it suits him … And Vince …” She pulled out another tissue, pressed her face into it, and began bawling hysterically. “Now Vince, too! He thinks … he’s got every right to abandon me even … though I’ve been a perfectly good mother … even though I never abandoned my mother … even after all those years of …”
Her shoulders shook and Neni, uncertain still of the best thing to do, put the tissue box on the floor and warily moved a hand to Cindy’s right shoulder and began rubbing it. Cindy’s cries grew louder as Neni rubbed gently, simultaneously thinking about what else she could do to help the madam. She had to call someone to come over as soon as possible. But who? Not Clark. Not Vince. Maybe Cheri or June—their numbers were on the refrigerator. But what would she give as a reason for calling at midnight? Tell them that a highly intoxicated Cindy couldn’t stop crying? Tell them she didn’t know what to say or do to make Cindy feel better?
“I am so sorry, madam,” Neni whispered. “I am so sorry for what your father did.”
Cindy continued crying, her shoulders quaking in accordance with her sounds.
“Did the police catch him, madam?”
Cindy shook her head.
“Maybe … maybe you could search for him, madam? Maybe if—”
“I walk down the street … every day I’m looking … looking at any man who looks like me … I’m wondering, could that be him? My mother told me I must have his hideous face because I don’t look anything like her … I walk around with this face, the face of a monster … and no one knows. No one knows how much it hurts! Vince has no idea how much it hurts!”
“I am sorry about Vince, too, madam,” Neni said.
Cindy picked up her glass of wine and gulped down the remainder. Neni continued rubbing her shoulder as they sat in silence, the only noise in the kitchen the sound of high-end electrical appliances. The kitchen floor had grown warm underneath them.
“I don’t want him to move to India,” Cindy said, a firmness slowly appearing in her voice. “But supporting him, that’s not what’s so hard for me to do. I can muster the strength to support my child even if it’s not what I want. But his hurtfulness to me … how he thinks he’s suddenly so righteous because he’s found spirituality, that’s what hurts me the most. I said to him, if what you care about is people, changing the world, what about getting a job at the Lehman Brothers Foundation? Clark could help him do that, but oh, no, what a ridiculous idea! He asked me, do I really think the goal of the Lehman Foundation is to make the world a better place? Do I know what Lehman Brothers does? Do I care about how corporations are destroying the world? I’ve tried to understand this anger … I can’t. What does he have against being wealthy? Why should good hardworking people feel bad about their money just because other people don’t have as much money? Once we were friends … my son and I, we were good friends. He found the Truth, and now I am na?ve, closed-minded, materialistic, lost. The only way I can see the light is to first lose my ego.”
Cindy sighed and tilted her head as if trying to stretch out an intolerable pain in her neck. “I told him, fine, go … go search for this Truth and Oneness … I want you to be happy. But instead of going all the way to India what about a retreat center somewhere in America … maybe someplace I heard about in New Mexico? Surely the Truth has to be present in America, too? Maybe go to a grad school somewhere near a retreat center? I just … I can’t bear the thought of him being so far away. If anything happened to him, it would … it would kill me.”
Twenty-two
SHE RETURNED FROM THE HAMPTONS WITH FAR MORE DESIGNER CLOTHES than she’d ever imagined having; shoes and accessories, too. Cindy had told her to take as much as she wanted from the storage space in the attic because whatever she didn’t take was going to charity, so Neni had cheerfully obliged, taking an old Louis Vuitton carry-on suitcase with a broken zipper, jam-packing it like roasted peanuts in a liquor bottle, and tying it shut with one of her blouses. Walking through Penn Station and the streets of Harlem, she had needed to stop at least a dozen times to rest from the weight of the Louis Vuitton on her right shoulder, the big brown paper bag full of Liomi’s clothes and toys on her left shoulder, her rolling luggage in one hand, and more clothes and toys for Liomi in the other.
“Did you have to suffer like that just for some free clothes?” Jende asked later that night, laughing, after she told him how difficult it had been managing all the bags while the baby kicked nonstop.
“What do you mean, ‘just for some free clothes’?” she said. “This is not just any free clothes, bébé. You know how much these things cost?”
Jende laughed her off, saying he didn’t care. Clothes were clothes, he said, no matter how much they cost or whose name was printed on them. But Betty did not laugh her off—Betty understood that there was an undeniable difference between the styles and auras of Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger; unlike Jende, she knew that all labeled clothes were not created equal, even if they were made from the same fabric by the same machine.
“You walk down the street wearing this Valentino blouse!” Betty exclaimed, looking at the label of a white silk blouse when she visited days after Neni’s return.
“Can you imagine?” Neni said.
“But you can’t wear this just to walk down the street.”
“Never in this lifetime. Something like this? I don’t even know where I’ll wear it to. Maybe a wedding. Or maybe I’ll save it and they’ll bury me in it when I die.”
“Then let me wear it for you now, eh?” Betty said, laughing and placing the blouse against her chest. “I’ll rock it with a leather skirt and high-heel boots and then bring it back as soon as I hear you’re dead so you can—”
“I beg, give me back my blouse, crazy woman!” Neni said, laughing and grabbing the blouse from Betty’s hands. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bedroom door, put the blouse against her chest, and felt its fine silk and delicate buttons.
“That woman must have really liked you, eh?” Betty said.
“Like me why?”
“To give you all these things.”
Neni shrugged and knelt down next to the Louis Vuitton suitcase to repack the things they’d taken out to admire. “She didn’t like me nothing,” she said as she refolded the dresses and blouses. “I did what she wanted me to do, she paid me with money and clothes.”
“But still …”
“It’s not like she’s ever going to wear them. You should have seen her closets. I never knew anyone can have that many clothes and shoes in one house.”
“I would have taken one or two pairs of shoes.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Neni retorted, scoffing at Betty’s bluff.
“Yes, I would,” Betty insisted, widening her eyes and laughing. “Maybe some Calvin Klein and DKNY jeans, too, if I can force this mountain buttocks into it. How would she know she lost it if she has so many things?”
“She wouldn’t ever know. How can anyone know if one of their fifty pairs of shoes gets lost? And I’m not just saying fifty. I swear to you, Betty, I stood in the shoe closet and counted. Fifty!”
“Plus another fifty or one hundred in her apartment in Manhattan.”
“I’m sure.”
“And she’s still so unhappy,” Betty said with a sigh. “Money truly is nothing.”
“She has her own kind of suffering that we can never understand,” Neni said, rising from the floor to sit next to Betty on the bed. “And she is trying her best to cover it, which is not easy—”
“Your father was a rapist, you don’t know his name, you don’t know his face. What kind of money is going to help you with that kind of problem? You don’t even know if he is black or white or Spanish.”
“Ah, Betty, don’t take it too far. Her father has to be a white man.”
“You’re saying that because you know the man?”
“The woman is a white woman!”
“That’s what you think, eh? I can take you to the Internet right now and show you on Google. All these white people, they all thought they were white, and then one day they find out that someone was black; their father, their grandfather—”