—
Sam had spent the morning feeling agitated. The day was hot and humid; his research wasn’t going well; he and Andrew were fighting. He was still cross with Harry even though they’d made up. He needed a break, from work, from Andrew, from himself. A Sam Mendes film was playing at Lincoln Plaza. Like his mother, he was a moviegoer. Most of the time he went alone; now and then, he invited Susanna. His favorite time was after lunch, instead of a nap. He caught the crosstown bus. He hated riding with New York cabbies. Most of them drove like drunks.
He found Road to Perdition creepy and perverse, a disappointment after American Beauty. I must be ready to be a father, he thought as the credits rolled, looking forward to the next Pixar. Standing up to leave, Sam saw his mother at the back of the theater, moving toward the exit. She was with a man he didn’t recognize. When he got outside, his mother and her companion were gone.
Sam called her that evening.
“Is there a man in your life?” Sam asked. “Other than Carlo?” Even when their father was alive, the boys teased their mother about her old boyfriend, Carlo Benedetti. He had a dashing, piratical quality they admired and he clearly admired Eleanor. “Do you wish you were married to my mom?” Jack asked him at a summer luncheon party. He was seven; his older brothers had egged him on. “You always hang around her at our parties.” Carlo laughed. “I think she’s meravigliosa,” he said.
“A man? Other than you and your brothers?” Eleanor said.
“I saw you at Lincoln Plaza today, at Road to Perdition, with a tall, dark stranger. I couldn’t see him, but I don’t think I know him.”
“Jim Cardozo,” she said, “an old acquaintance. I ran into him at the theater.”
“Is he a romantic interest?” Sam said.
“No,” Eleanor said. “Children. Friends. Grandchildren. That’s enough. Wonderful news about Will. They were trying for a long time. Another girl. All-of-a-kind grandchildren.”
“What does he do, this Jim Cardozo?” Sam asked. Eleanor didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said. “Childish question.”
“Has Harry been talking to you?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I told him he was wrong. I was very angry with him. He said he apologized.”
“A Harry apology,” Eleanor said. “It was my fault he thought what he thought, and he would now stop thinking it. I don’t believe the word ‘sorry’ crossed his lips.”
“Are you still mad at him?” Sam asked.
“At the moment, I prefer the Wolinski boys,” she said.
Anne Lehman fell in love with Jim Cardozo when she was a freshman at the Spence School. She was fourteen; he was twenty, a junior at Yale. She was walking down Madison Avenue with her mother. Jim was walking up, his arm around a girl. They were so beautiful, the pair of them, she had to turn away, not to be caught gaping. They looked so much alike they might have been sister and brother, except they couldn’t be, not the way they were together, their bodies magnetically entwined. Later, Anne would wonder if it was Jim’s happiness as much as his beauty that had ensnared her.
Anne saw him again the following September, at Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Emanu-El. He was sitting with a man and a woman—his parents, she decided, plain versions of him—the beautiful girl was not there. Anne followed him around at the reception until she learned his name. She went home and practiced writing “Mrs. James Cardozo.” On her wedding day, Anne confessed to her mother that she had been in love with Jim for sixteen years, long before she met him. “I saw him on the street and I knew he was it. I would have him or no one.” She didn’t mention the girl. Her mother, a practical woman, argued with her. “You don’t fall in love with strangers,” Mrs. Lehman said. “Love at first sight is chump’s love, not worthy of the name. So many things can make your heart beat faster. Almost anything at fourteen.” When Anne insisted it was love, her mother said, “Oh, my dear, I must feel sorry for you, then. ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ Oscar Wilde.” Anne didn’t think her mother was wrong. She had no sense of triumph, only one of ill-fated inevitability. Jewish tribalism and Christian anti-Semitism had made the match.
Mrs. Lehman, née Ethel Lewisohn, had gone to Vassar. Devoted as she was to her alma mater—she endowed a chair in her grandmother’s name and sent her three daughters there—she had resisted its efforts to educate her. She had read only to fill her commonplace book. Her head was stuffed with epigrams, which she would summon, as she had on Anne’s wedding day, to end a conversation she thought had drifted off track. They were her “trouncing bon mots,” in family parlance, and she had a gift for calling up the right quote at the right time. Generally, she won her point, touché without irony. At bedtime, her preferred reading was Bartlett’s. She was still, at sixty, collecting quotations. The night after the wedding, she browsed in the marriage section. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” Jane Austen. “Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.” G. K. Chesterton. “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” Oscar Wilde. She sighed as she read the last: if only she’d had it at hand when she was speaking with Anne. Too late, she thought, closing the book, years too late.
Mrs. Lehman preferred English sources; they were wittier than the Americans. The French were mean, which some occasions called for. All her wit was borrowed. She couldn’t tell a joke, she often confused a cliché with a witticism, and she collected only those sayings and quotes that confirmed her stout good sense. But she was so good-natured and cheerful that her family and close friends never minded, and her trove was, after forty years, impressive: Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Montaigne, Thackeray, Machiavelli—writers and thinkers she’d never think of reading. There were some in her crowd who thought she was the cliché, a character out of a Restoration comedy or Jane Austen, like Mrs. Malaprop or Sir Walter Elliot, his nose in the Baronetage; but there was nothing ridiculous about Ethel Lehman despite her highbrow illiteracy. She had a kind of Will Rogers shrewdness about people and a generosity of spirit. She believed the rich should pay taxes; she thought the state should support the poor; she marched against the Vietnam War; she supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was contented in her own marriage and wished her children the same estate. She had tried to talk Anne out of marrying Jim Cardozo, if not out of loving him. She liked Jim, the whole family did, but the relationship seemed so one-sided. Hopelessly smitten, Anne didn’t argue. “You’re right,” she said to her mother. “I can’t help myself. No exit.”