Dear Eleanor,
I’m sorry for being so out of sorts the last time we met. I didn’t much care for Road to Perdition and it made me irritable and no doubt irritating. I know I talked too much about Nathan. I was still recovering from his year in Haiti. Anne and I worried all the time, even though he’s the most sensible and practical young man I know. It’s a huge relief to have him safe in medical school. He’ll be an excellent doctor. We feel very lucky in him and each other. I don’t know how you managed with five.
I’ve cut back on my surgeries. My hands are getting arthritic, my eyes are growing cataracts. Getting old surprised me. You never seem to change. Anne only gets better. Wishing you all the best.
Jim
Eleanor handed the note to Anne. Anne shook her head. “No, no,” Eleanor said. “Please read it.”
Anne read the note. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said, her eyes watering.
“We went for coffee after the movie. Jim talked about Nathan the whole time,” Eleanor said. “He was so proud of him, so happy he was going to be a doctor.” Anne handed her back the letter. “No, keep it,” Eleanor said.
“I always thought I was in the looking-glass version of Pride and Prejudice,” Anne said, “the one where Charlotte Lucas and not Lizzy Bennet marries Mr. Darcy.”
“Funny,” Eleanor said. “I thought of myself as Isabel Archer in a bowdlerized Portrait of a Lady. She accepts Lord Warburton’s proposal on the spot.”
“A Vassar education does that,” Anne said.
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “It allowed us somehow to think of ourselves as both heroines and wives.”
Anne shifted in her seat. “Jim was Heathcliff,” she said, “in Philip Roth’s Wuthering Heights.” She didn’t mean to be witty or malicious, though she knew she might be accused of being both.
Without thinking, Eleanor reached across the table and touched Anne’s hand. “Don’t rewrite,” she said. “Don’t let the present get in the way of the past.”
Anne’s eyes watered again. She folded the letter and put it away in her purse. Would she now have to mourn him, miss him? she wondered. She didn’t believe the letter but it moved her, the effort he’d made, writing it for her.
“I’m afraid I have to run,” Eleanor said. “I promised to look after my son Harry’s two girls. I had five sons and now I have four granddaughters, with a fifth on the way.” She stood up. “He saw you, you know, as his great good luck.” Anne looked away to keep from crying. “He did,” Eleanor said.
—
Lea called Sam. “Harry told me he had a fling with a colleague, Mary Ann Evans, like George Eliot. He says it’s over.”
Sam groaned. “He’s a schmuck, Lea. He’s always been a schmuck, he’ll always be a schmuck. You married the schmuck. He’s yours.”
Lea laughed. “I like that, the Schmuck Theory of Matrimony. Like the sign in the antique store: ‘You Break It, You Own It.’?”
“He told me about it. He was heartsore. He was ashamed and sorry and so afraid you’d leave him,” Sam said.
“She was pregnant,” Lea said. “She miscarried. She has a husband. It might have been his.”
“I told him not to tell you,” Sam said. “I told him to man up and live with his guilt.”
“Yes, well, the schmuck is also the blurter, as we all know.”
“What did you do?” Sam asked.
“I told him he had to move out, at least for a while. I needed to get my head clear. He asked your mother if he could stay with her. She said no. She said, ‘If you’re old enough to mess around in your marriage, you’re too old to live with your mother. Or, your mother is too old to live with you.’?”
“Good old Mom,” Sam said.
Lea liked talking to Sam. Unlike her women friends, he didn’t commiserate. He didn’t make her feel sorry for herself.
“Did you meet her?” Lea asked. “Did you see her? Was she pretty?”
“I saw her once, at the law school. She was crying. I think she was pretty. Hard to say when they’re crying. She looked like you.”
“Have you heard from him?” Lea said.
“No, I saw him maybe two weeks ago. We talked about talking to the Wolinskis.”
“Harry told me. You got tested. Harry’s not so angry now with your father. He’s not sure he wants to do anything about it.”
“I’m not angry at Dad. I never was. I’m curious.”
“She was younger than me,” Lea said.
“They always are. That’s their great appeal. Also, they’re not the wife or the husband. In an affair, you don’t have to talk to them. Better, you don’t have to listen to them.”
“Oh, Sam,” Lea said, “you’ve lived a very sophisticated life.”
“Take him back, Lea. You’re good for each other. He’s a dog.”
“I don’t like him right now. I need to like him again before I can let him come home.”
“That sounds like something my mother would say,” Sam said.
“Harry pays attention better when I sound like your mother,” Lea said.
—
Harry needed to confess to his mother, his confession to Lea providing little relief. Eleanor wasn’t interested. “No details,” she told him. “I don’t like confessions.” They were having dinner downstairs from her apartment, at the Café des Artistes, the farthest Eleanor felt like going to be with Harry.
Harry was hurt. He didn’t understand. “I feel awful. I wish I hadn’t done it.”
“I wish you hadn’t done it, but more, I wish you hadn’t told me,” Eleanor said.
“I was miserable the whole time.”
“What did you expect?” Eleanor said. “Happiness? It’s not in the cards. One person might be happy, but never both. The whole point of adultery is to be unhappy—excited, guilty, and unhappy. Sex, new sex, is the point.”
Harry winced. He hated when his mother said anything about sex.
“Do you think I was in it only for the sex?” he said.
“Are you saying you wanted to marry the woman?” Eleanor said.
“No, no,” he said. “But we talked too.”
“How did she get pregnant?” Eleanor asked.
Harry was quiet. Eleanor waited.
“I don’t think it was mine,” he said.
“Did you use condoms?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Do you want to stay in your marriage?” Eleanor said.
Harry nodded.
“Will Lea take you back?”
Harry lowered his head and started crying silently into his napkin.
—
Harry agreed to go with Sam to meet Hugh Wolinski. He was, he admitted, curious. Iain couldn’t make it; he was at sea. Hugh was reluctant. “What’s the point?” he said. “Please,” Sam said. “We’d like to have a better ending than the one last year in the Surrogate’s Court.” They made a date for the Saturday before Easter at the Parlour Bar on West Eighty-Sixth. Rupert had been dead for three years, almost to the day.
Sam and Harry got there early, taking a table in back. Watching Hugh walk toward them, Sam thought, He could be Dad’s son. Sam and Harry stood up. They shook hands with Hugh. They ordered beers.
Hugh waited. This wasn’t his show.
“I’ve taken a DNA test,” Sam said. “If you take one, we can find out if we are brothers”—Sam paused—“and we could make some kind of amends.”