My old life, she would think. And then she would muse on the irony of the phrase. She was young in her old life. She was old in her new life. It didn't add up. She wished she had a doorman.
She never let her daughters know how she felt. What would be the point? Annie went off swimming at the beach in the early morning. Miranda took walks in thunderstorms. They seemed to have adjusted to this country life very well. She would stay in Westport for the time being, for their sakes.
It was not easy. She was not a youngster just starting out. It had not been easy for her in Westport when she was a youngster just starting out, so how had anyone imagined it would work this time? Lou had meant no harm, of course. But Joseph, Joseph of all people, should have known better than to consign her to a cottage in a town with traffic but no place to go.
In New York, Betty and Josie had often entertained when they were younger, and even in the last few years they would invite old friends to dinner. More often than not, though, they would meet their friends at restaurants. There were always new restaurants in New York about which to read, at which to make reservations a month in advance, in which eventually to overeat and overspend. Restaurants had taken the place of movies, which had all become so violent and crude, and children, who had all grown up, in the social lives of the Weissmanns and their circle. Betty wondered where that circle was now. They had perhaps circled around Joseph, for they had certainly not drawn their wagons around her. There were a few close friends--the Harveys and the Littmans--who called regularly and tried to make dates with Betty. And there were her friends from college, Judith and Florence. Nothing changed those friendships, which were intimate and deep and existed still, as they had for decades, almost exclusively on the phone. But Social Life, as Betty once knew it, was gone. The restaurants in Westport were dull and overpriced. There was no movie theater, even if she had wanted to see a film and could have found a friend to accompany her. There was nothing to do, no one to do it with, and she wouldn't drive at night, so on top of everything else there was no way to get there. She daydreamed about the buses in New York with their interesting bits of poetry or quotes from George Eliot, their ads for Con Ed or the Bronx Zoo. How civilized and communal New York seemed from the vantage point of this lonely land of cars and crows and Lanes and Drives and Crescents.
"Oh, it's so peaceful here," her friend Judith said when she came to have lunch and go to the Westport Playhouse with Betty one day. They walked along Main Street, peering into shop windows. "You can see the sky! All the stores we have on Madison Avenue, but on this quaint little street. A theater, too! It's got everything New York has, really."
In some perverse way this was true--the play turned out to be just as dreadful as most of the theater in New York, the shops were frequented by the same loud, slender mothers as the ones who shopped in the city, the styles were too young for Betty, just as they were on Madison, the sky was the same gray swathe high above.
"Very cosmopolitan little town," Betty had answered her friend in her most chipper voice. But Westport struck her as neither cosmopolitan nor little. In fact, it did not even strike her as a town. It was large and spread out and bustling and provincial.
"If you have to be in exile, Betty, you could do worse," said Judith, who was no fool and had known Betty such a long time.
Betty smiled at her. How lucky she was to have friends who understood what she meant rather than what she said. "You're absolutely right," she said. But as they drove out of the parking lot onto the Post Road, she could not help adding, "Look at this traffic!"
Cousin Lou's latest event was a particularly large dinner party in honor of Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov. Mr. Shpuntov had changed his name to Sherwood many years ago, on October 24, 1929, to be exact, Black Thursday. He was eighteen years old on that day, and fearing the Jews would be blamed for a stock-market crash as they were blamed for every other disaster, Shpuntov looked into the future and saw himself as Sherwood.
But as Sherwood ne Shpuntov got older and began to forget more and more, one of the things he remembered perfectly was his old name. He had stopped responding to Sherwood about a year before. He disliked younger people calling him Izzy, thinking it impertinent, and as there was never anyone present who wasn't younger than his ninety-eight years, he prevailed. Shpuntov he had been, and Shpuntov he became.
Mr. Shpuntov was seated between Betty and his son-in-law, Lou. His daughter, her hair coaxed into its stiff, elaborate swoops and valleys, sat across from him.
"My father and I were just marveling at the farmers' market phenomenon here in Westport," Rosalyn was saying to a woman sitting beside her.
"That man has a terrible comb-over," Mr. Shpuntov said loudly to Cousin Lou, pointing his chin at his daughter. "Comb-overs . . . never liked 'em myself."