25
Ed had been working in the garage since she woke up. He had emptied much of its contents into the backyard, which now bore an uncomfortable resemblance to those of their immediate neighbors. It was a hot May morning, and sweat was pouring off him.
“I’m taking Connell,” she said.
“Okay.”
“You sure you don’t want to come?”
“I’m a little busy.” He gestured to the clutter. She felt bad taking the boy, who probably should have been helping him with whatever this project was, but she couldn’t face those houses alone again.
In the car, Connell found Z100 and turned the volume up.
“How come you’re not telling me to turn it down?”
“It’s not that loud,” she said.
“Dad doesn’t let me turn it up when he’s driving. He says he needs to concentrate.”
“I don’t mind.” She started tapping the fingers of her free hand on the door. It was a song she’d heard while driving to work. Connell smiled at her, and she felt like the favored parent for a change. He’d always gravitated toward his father—a consequence, she suspected, of her having returned to work so soon after he was born. It probably wasn’t just that she was out of the house so much; it was also the way she got on the phone with her friends after dinner as though punching the clock at a second job. But some of that, she saw now, had been the need for escape. There would be less of that when they moved. She could begin to be more of the mother he wanted.
“Your father’s got a lot on his mind,” she said generously.
“He’s the most uptight person in the world. He grips the wheel with both hands the whole time. You can’t say anything to him.”
When they first met, he would pick her up with one elbow hanging out the window, like a cool guy in a movie.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be an adult,” she said. “There’s a lot to think about all the time.”
“He wants me to have the change ready for the tollbooth about a mile in advance. He gets all weird about it. He freaks out if I don’t have it in my hand, counted out. And then he throws it in that bin with all this force, like he’s throwing a baseball. It’s so awkward. What’s up with him? Why is he so weird?”
She had been a passenger of Ed’s herself. It was as if he was doing brain surgery instead of driving a car. “Fathers are just weird sometimes,” she said. “Don’t think too much about it.”
“It’s so embarrassing.”
A song came on that he liked and he bobbed his head up and down and tapped his hands on the dashboard.
“I want your input,” she said. “I’ve been looking at all these houses and I can’t tell what I think anymore.”
“What about Dad? What does he say?”
“Your father and I have a difference of opinion right now about whether we should move,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to be a man about this. I might need you to keep quiet about it for a while if we find a place we really like.”
“Sure.”
She felt her foot falling heavier on the gas pedal as they hit the Grand Central Parkway. A new spirit entered the car. She had a conspirator. She could feel it making a difference already. She felt freer than Ed as she drove. She was cool enough to appreciate her son’s music, to pick up a little speed on the highway, to let the coins wait until they got right up to the booth. She had enough energy to make important changes in her life, to pull her husband out of a pit, to yank her whole family out of the maw of a neighborhood that threatened to swallow them whole.
? ? ?
Gloria gave Connell the full open-armed treatment. She seemed inordinately glad to meet him. At first Eileen thought it was a salesperson’s come-on, but then it occurred to her that by existing, Connell might have been confirming that his mother wasn’t a fantasist.
“I’ve found the perfect place for you,” Gloria said. “It’s gorgeous. It’s slightly out of your price range, but only slightly. I want you to consider it. It’s as close as you can get to your perfection with the money you can spend.”
They drove up Palmer Road toward Yonkers, past the stately complexes of condos and leafy gardens, but turned off it before they’d gone too far. She had studied the area enough to know that this was an outpost of Bronxville with Bronxville post office boxes and Yonkers schools. But the schools wouldn’t matter with Connell heading into the city in the fall. A sign announced—either proudly or defensively, it was hard to tell which—“Lawrence Park West.”
The area was promising. It was a mixture of old and new homes, but the road was curvy and lined with enormous oaks, and between the wooded plots, she caught glimpses of stucco Tudors with carriage houses, and even what may have been a tennis court. They turned onto a wider street and the road flattened and the houses were all easy to spot but majestically elevated above the road. They stopped in front of a gray colonial with overgrown hedges and columns that linked the porch on the first level to one on top. Stone pillars flanked the driveway, and next to the front walk was a jockey holding a lantern. His red coat had been chipped and bleached to pink in the sun. The house looked as if it had been built sometime in the first half of the century, but built well, and it was twice as large as the houses she’d seen the week before. She was hopeful.
Gloria led them up the driveway to a staircase at the back entrance. A patio of moss-covered brick, framed by a stone wall and a terrific amount of growth, resembled an English garden gone to seed. It opened up onto the craggy slope, which contained an enormous stone blanketed by ivy. Atop the hill were houses accessed by another street.
The kitchen looked like it had been despoiled by squatters. Cabinet doors didn’t close right, the wallpaper bubbled, and the brick floor was coated in a thick, dingy skin of polyurethane. Everything on the rear side of the house—the kitchen, the den, the dining room—was dark as a catacomb, but she could tell that light would penetrate its depths on a good day, particularly if she trimmed some of the bushes, and while the dining room had a matted rug and a rickety-looking chandelier, she could envision the grand meals she’d serve there, and the living room was practically bleached by light. Next to it was the brick-floored foyer and the entrance proper, and a flight of banistered stairs leading to the second floor. Off the landing at the bottom of the stairs was a little flight down into what could be a reading room, next to what would be Ed’s study, with a bay window and built-in bookshelves.
Gloria went to the two front doors and threw them open with a flourish. Light flooded in. Looking left from the front porch, which was fringed by a rotting wooden fence, Eileen could see where the road curved and headed down to Palmer Road, the main artery into the town that lent this house its respectable mailing address.
Eileen stood on the porch, imagining people opening the big metal gate at the bottom and making their way up the gently winding path. The thought of their approach thrilled her, the moments of anticipation, the embraces, the handing off of wine bottles, cakes, presents. And then she turned and saw Connell looking out the window in the living room, an ethereal light flooding against him, so that he resembled a figure in one of those portrait paintings of the children of nobility from centuries past. These days and years would act as a crucible in which his fate was distilled. The closing down of possibilities had begun, almost imperceptibly. She had to act quickly to preserve her image of the life she imagined, in which Ed toiled happily in his study, turning over ideas until they yielded fresh hypotheses, and she was a grand hostess and the matriarch of a respected clan. This house would be the backdrop to the second act of their lives together. It was Connell’s contemplative gaze that gave her that assurance.
“What do you think?” Gloria asked rhetorically as she drifted into the room. She was a maestro of timing: there was no need to respond. She led them up the stairs like a groom guiding his bride to the bower.
“I’ll show you the other bedrooms first,” she said, “and then the master suite.”
She led them to a room so massive it could have swallowed Connell’s current bedroom whole, along with the spare, with room left over.
“This could be your bedroom,” Eileen said.
“Sweet!” He darted into the room and walked its perimeter like a cat marking its territory. He opened and closed the closet doors and then lay in the center of the room and stretched his arms and legs as far as he could. She laughed out loud at his exuberance.
“Come on,” she said. “Get up now.”
“It’s okay,” Gloria said. “He can be excited.”
“You could land a plane in here,” he said.
“Maybe a helicopter,” Gloria allowed.
“There’s no doubt it’s a big enough house,” Eileen said cautiously. How “slightly” out of her price range was this house? This might be another tease, only this time she wouldn’t have done it to herself.
“You haven’t even seen the master bedroom.”
“I’m a little worried about the price.”
“You’re prepared to spend four hundred thousand,” Gloria said. “Five at the most.”
“The uppermost,” Eileen said.
They were in the hallway now, their voices low.
“This house is five sixty.”
“That’s a big difference.” Eileen tried to hide the panic and disappointment that had already set in.
“Not when you think about the fact that when it’s fixed up, it’s a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar house. Minimum. Minimum.” Gloria spoke coolly, a little impatiently, as if they were discussing an artwork she didn’t want to sully with considerations of money. “There are some catches, though.”
“Catches,” Eileen said.
“Not necessarily deal breakers. How handy is your husband?”
She thought of Ed at home in the garage, tools strewn around him in a blast-radius circle, trying to make the house presentable enough to entice her to stay in it. Everything he knew about home improvement he’d learned from how-to books. Whenever he made a study of something, though, he could do it at least passably well. “If I can earn a PhD,” he’d said when they’d had a short in the hallway light, “I can figure out how to fix some faulty wiring.” And he had. The handiness came at the expense of great effort. Doing a big project around the house always left him exhausted.
“He’s pretty handy,” she said. “Why?”
“This house was on the market for over a year, then taken off and relisted. They just dropped the price.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s suffered some water damage. It’s a twofold problem. It’s at the bottom of a hill, so there’s always runoff. And it’s built on a rock, with a rock behind it, so everything just flows into it. On top of that, the pipes burst this winter. There’s a lot of damage in the basement. A lot of it needs to be ripped out and rebuilt. Plus there’s no guarantee the water won’t come back. You’re going to need a new roof in a couple of years. It’s an expensive proposition to fix this place, but it’s a steal if you can do any of the work yourself.”
“My husband can do it,” she said.
It would be good for him. He could sweat this thing out through manual labor. She could see him drinking a beer in jeans and a T-shirt, wiping his brow and holding a baseball cap at his hip.
“Let’s make our way to your room,” Gloria said. They left Connell and stopped briefly at each of two average-sized bedrooms and a bathroom with matching sinks below bulb-lighted mirrors like those in dressing rooms. A toilet hid demurely behind French doors.