“You’re holding up very well,” Eleanor said.
“Holding up is the word. Gravity has kicked in. I’m past my prime in L.A. I’m thirty-eight, no chicken. Everyone is too good-looking in L.A., until they turn thirty-two, except the nanny. Too risky. Then, one day, they’re too old, and only good-looking for someone their age. The feverish regimen begins: fasting, hydrating, lifting, running, cleansing. They see a trainer four days a week. They eat nuts and tofu. No drinking at lunch. Cocaine only on weekends. The men wear weaves and cowboy boots. The women have mouths like duckbills. As for their gravity-defying boobs…” He stopped.
“Are the women looking for husbands?” Eleanor said.
Will nodded. “L.A. is Noah’s Ark. A divorce means you’re on the market for your next husband—or wife. Men too need to be married. The unmarried ones are too expensive to insure.”
“I’m not marrying again. I won’t risk my luck. And I’m not going to have ‘work.’ It’s too late anyway. I’ve been told you have to lay a foundation in your thirties.”
“I’ll bet there are men who’d like to marry you, even with your crow’s-feet.” Will leaned in, as if to examine her face. “What about Carlo Benedetti?”
“I can’t imagine the gauntlet a suitor would have to run with the five of you.”
“We’d have a hard time,” Will said. “We’d give you a hard time.”
“Do you remember proposing to me when you were five?”
“I hope you accepted,” Will said.
“I was torn. You all proposed.”
“Oedipus run amok,” Will said.
“Dad began locking the bedroom door,” Eleanor said. “?‘Too much night traffic,’ he said.”
“New York isn’t Noah’s Ark, is it? You haven’t been ‘dropped’ now you’re on your own?” Will said.
“No, not yet,” Eleanor said, “but I am very careful at dinner parties. No gin or vodka. No flirting. Only married people are allowed to flirt. It makes no sense. A widow is much less dangerous than an unhappy wife. A female acquaintance, divorced for several years, was almost salivating at Dad’s funeral, like one of Job’s comforters: ‘Just you wait, the invitations will dry up. All your friends will think you’re after their husbands.’ As if.”
“Bill Macy?” Will said. “Gag me with a spoon.”
—
Eleanor told Will about her conversation with Harry at Café Luxembourg. Will groaned.
“Jesus, one for the Guinness book of blurts,” he said.
“He was awful,” Eleanor said. “I had just told him I wanted to give some money to the Wolinski boys and he accuses me of a lifetime of deception. He sounded like an injured wife.”
“I don’t think he believed it. He was angry, he thought it, boom,” Will said. “If he says he believes it now, he’s talked himself into believing it. Harry’s like Jack that way. Their editing functions are screwy. I don’t know where that comes from. You don’t shoot your mouth off; Dad didn’t.”
“Oh, no, Dad did,” Eleanor said. “He said stinging things all the time, not at home, not with us, except of course his Granny slap-downs, but with almost everyone else, everywhere else. He was famously rude. I was always expecting New York magazine to write him up as ‘The Rudest Man in New York.’ People would complain to me all the time. He lashed the associates in the firm and even some of the partners. He told poor old Gosford he was a ‘useful idiot.’ Gosford called me in tears.”
“Are you still planning to give money to the Wolinski boys?” Will asked.
“Probably. I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “It’s become so fraught, all of it. Harry is still angry, calling Dad a bigamist, rewriting his childhood.”
“You should think about it some more,” Will said. “I’ve been wanting to say something, looking for the right moment. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it.” He looked at his mother, trying to read her face. “What a mess,” he said. She was silent, unreadable. Will continued, “Vera was disingenuous. Not the boys.”
“What’s this?” Eleanor said.
“Did you look carefully at the photograph of her and Dad, her and Alleged Dad?”
“Only to see if it was Dad,” she said. “It didn’t seem to matter.”
“I took it with me,” Will said. “There was something about it that seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not the sandals, the whole thing. It kept bugging me. Last week, planning this visit, I looked at it under a magnifying glass. It might be Dad; it might be Viggo Mortensen. I assume it is Vera, yes?” Eleanor nodded. Will continued, “I asked a photographer friend to enlarge it. The faces got blurrier but the rest got clearer. Eureka. The cars were all from the ’50s rounded with a kind of Deco look. There were four of them. I don’t think any of them was later than 1954. No pointed fins. Vera and Alleged Dad are standing in front of a restaurant, Toffenetti’s. It was rounded too, with glass bricks and metal trim. Toffenetti’s closed in 1968. I called the New York Public Library’s reference line. Nathan’s Famous took over the site. At Forty-Third and Broadway. I remember eating at Nathan’s.”
“It didn’t hold a candle to Gray’s Papaya.”
“I think I bought a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya every day after school for ten years.”
“Do you remember when Sam preserved one in formaldehyde, in the same jar as his fetal pig?” Eleanor said. “The pig life cycle. It made me queasy.”
Eleanor picked up the photo. “It’s Dad,” she said. “I knew it the minute I saw it.”
“In her letter to you, Vera said she’d had a relationship with Dad in the mid-’70s. This photo is twenty years earlier.”
Eleanor was silent. The lost year, she thought.
“Are you all right, Mom?” Will said.
“I’m taking this all in, or trying. You’re saying Vera knew Dad in the mid-’50s.” Eleanor cleared her throat. “I thought Dad, the young Dad, looked like the young Max von Sydow. He had wolf’s eyes. You all have them.”
“Sheep in wolves’ clothing then,” Will said. “We’re an uxorious clan.”
“Are you?” Eleanor said.
Will stared at his mother. “We’re not?” he asked.
Eleanor didn’t answer. Will started to ask, “Who?” but changed his mind. He didn’t want to know.
“Dad, Viggo, Max, sheep, wolf,” he said, “the photo wasn’t taken in ’75.”
Eleanor thought back to 1975. She and Rupert had visited England for the first time since he’d left; they had celebrated their fourteenth anniversary, double seven; they had gone to Jim’s wedding. Though never unkind to her, Rupert was seriously out of sorts all that year, distracted and irritated, as the English would have it; anxious and depressed, in the American vernacular.
“I think it odd, don’t you,” Will said, persisting in the face of her inscrutability, “that Vera’s only evidence is so old, long before the years she claimed she had a relationship with Dad? Why didn’t she say she’d known him in the ’50s? Wouldn’t that have strengthened her case?”
“I lie sometimes,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you? I never told you boys to always tell the truth. We don’t owe the truth to everyone.”