“Why didn’t I notice? His color was so bad,” Nathan said.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Anne said. She wondered if Nathan knew about his father’s drinking and drug taking. They’d never spoken about it. “He had set his course. You couldn’t have saved him.”
Nathan looked as if he might cry. He was supposed to save people. It was his job. “I didn’t try,” he said.
“Oh, Nathan,” Anne said. “He was beyond saving.”
Nathan stared at his mother, rattled by the ambivalence of her remark. “Don’t you care that he’s dead?” he said. “Don’t you miss him?”
“I’m sad for him,” Anne said, “and sad for us.”
“I wish I knew him better,” Nathan said.
Going through Jim’s papers, Anne found a sealed envelope addressed to Eleanor. Her first impulse was to read it; her second, to toss it. She resisted both. She felt surprised, then disappointed, then slighted that she hadn’t received a sympathy note from Eleanor. The omission seemed out of character for someone overbred. Perhaps Jim’s letter explained its absence. His death had been, once her feelings of guilt dissipated, a relief to Anne. The letter to Eleanor was unsettling, igniting old feelings of envy and jealousy, feelings that shouldn’t have outlived Jim. The Wolinski lawsuit had given no satisfaction. Anne decided to deliver the letter in person.
When Jim died, Eleanor was in Los Angeles, visiting Will and Francie and their infant daughter, Mary Phipps Gore Falkes, who, everyone agreed, was the spitting image of Rupert, with her white fuzz and pale eyes. “Dad would chide me for gene packing,” Eleanor said to Will, laughing. “He’s getting his own in the next generation. And all girls.” Francie liked her mother-in-law and allowed her to hold the baby. She even agreed to go out to dinner one night and let Eleanor babysit. “I shall deliver her as I found her, I promise,” Eleanor said. “Oh, it’s not you,” Francie said. “It’s me. She’ll be fine without me. I might die.”
Eleanor had begun reading the obituaries and death notices in the Times when Rupert was dying. Her father’s death, three years earlier, had been painful but expected. He was old. Rupert’s death at sixty-six was unexpected, unnatural, unfair. She had counted on them living into their eighties, downsizing to three bedrooms, perhaps moving to the East Side, a West Sider’s idea of assisted living, where everything could be ordered by phone and delivered to the door. With Rupert gone, she felt trapped in their huge apartment. Anyone might die at any time. So long as I don’t outlive the boys, she thought.
On Sundays, after browsing the wedding notices to find out whose children had married, she browsed the death notices to find out whose husbands and wives had died. When did I become the last generation before death? she wondered. She envied the lucky dead, those who lived to eighty-eight, the perfect age to die after a brief, chemo-free illness, leaving just enough time to say good-bye and good luck. Those who lived longer she pitied; they were too likely to have outlived their friends, their money, their arteries, and their wits.
Eleanor didn’t see Jim’s notice when she was in L.A. She found out only when Anne called her to ask if they might meet. “Jim left you a letter.”
Eleanor agreed as agreeably as she could manage. She couldn’t see her way to denying a grieving widow bearing a letter meant for another woman. “Does morning coffee work for you this Saturday, ten a.m.? We could meet at E.A.T.”
After their last dreadful time together, Eleanor had never wanted to see Jim again. She got her wish, though she’d never wished him dead. As a girl, she had wished her mother dead, dreaming violent ends for her as she fell asleep at night. Eaten by tigers was her favorite. Tigers would succeed. She found herself relieved by Jim’s death. He’d become an albatross. She had not minded his mooning over her, at St. Thomas, at his wedding, at the movies, not until Rupert was dying. He kept dropping by the hospital room as if she wanted to see him. Rupert’s oncologist noticed it. Eleanor shrugged it off. “Does he?” She had given up, temporarily, her budding rudeness. There were so many people whose goodwill she needed for Rupert’s care; she couldn’t let rudeness take over. Rudeness, she had discovered, was an earthquake emotion, growing exponentially with each eruption. She held her temper even as she wished she could get a TRO against Jim. What had she seen in him, she wondered. We were twenty. He was beautiful. Our mothers were harridans. He’d read Anna Karenina in Russian.
As she walked across the park to meet Anne, Eleanor wondered what about her encouraged postmortem confessions. She had never heard from Louisa again after their last encounter. She imagined Louisa hadn’t the stomach to confront her mother. She had heard from the mother only once after her father’s funeral, a month later. Mrs. Cantwell had phoned to ask for three items from Mr. Phipps’s apartment, a pair of Nefertiti-head bookends, a silver candlestick, and a Persian prayer rug. Mrs. Cantwell giggled when she asked for the last item. “Your father said he worshipped me,” she said. Rupert wanted to say no “on principle,” the lawyer’s aversion to making distributions outside the will to people he didn’t approve of. Eleanor said to let her have them. “My principle is expediency. I want to be done with her.” Nothing in her father’s new apartment meant anything to her, and Mrs. Cantwell’s claims on the items had made them repellent to Eleanor. She hoped she might part with Anne as easily, if more cordially. She would walk out of E.A.T. again if she needed to.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Eleanor said as she sat down. Anne had gotten to the restaurant first and taken a table in the back. Eleanor silently gauged the number of footsteps to the exit. “I hadn’t heard until you called,” she said. “I was in Los Angeles, visiting my son Will, and his wife and their new infant daughter.” Anne sat up straighter at this personal opening, fearing for a moment that Eleanor knew from her father about her stalking days. Officially this was only their second encounter.
“It was sudden,” Anne said. “Blocked arteries. No one knew. He never got checkups. He didn’t believe in stress tests. He didn’t believe in doctors.”
“My mother died of a heart defect,” Eleanor said, “though she knew about it. She was younger than Jim. Dr. Schwinn—do you know him?—was her doctor. Jim found him for me.”
“Schwinn reviewed the autopsy report,” Anne said. “If you die at home alone, too young, they do an autopsy.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. It said “Eleanor Falkes.”
“Do you mind if I read it here?” Eleanor said. She didn’t want to take the letter with her.
The note was written by hand: