The Unfolding, page 28
“What?”
“That I didn’t know who Condoleezza Rice was.”
Tony laughs.
“I should have recognized her. And it sucks that my parents didn’t trust me with the truth. Only because Mom is having an actual breakdown did they decide to tell me.”
“I don’t think it was about trust.”
“Well, there’s no other excuse,” Meghan says.
“Shame is a powerful thing,” Tony says.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Palm Springs, California
10:00 a.m.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Charlotte calls the Big Guy. “Let’s make a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“I’ll come home for Christmas if you buy me a car.”
“We have a car.”
“I want you to buy a car for a friend of mine.”
“What friend?”
“My roommate from Betty Ford; she’s moved over to the sober house now and I’d like to buy her a car. If we have a car, we can go places.”
“You can go places in our car.”
“She loves to drive,” Charlotte says. “It would be a nice gesture. A celebration of her sobriety.”
“Can’t she buy herself a car?”
“If she uses her family’s money, it comes with strings attached. This is about independence, giving something that has no strings attached. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“I’m sure you already know this,” he says. “You can just write a check. There is plenty of money in your name.”
“I don’t want to use that money. I want you to do it for me.”
“Fine,” he says. “I assume you have a car in mind. A Ford? A Chevy?”
“I have my eye on something. It’s at the Mercedes dealer. There are two. I can’t make up my mind. The 190SL seems small. Maybe the 220SE. I like the cream but there’s also a red one—red is a great color for a car.”
“Hell of a nice gift,” he says. A Mercedes is triple the cost of a Ford. Clearly this isn’t just for transportation; there’s an element of style in the mix. “You drove them both?”
“I did.”
“Did you go with your friend?”
There’s a long pause. “I didn’t tell her that I was looking for her. I made it seem like it was for someone else.”
“Like who?”
“You. I told her that I felt bad for all I’d put you through and that I wanted to get you a sporty little gift as a kind of reparation.”
He laughs. “Well, how do you want to do it? Want me to go over there with the two of you and square it away?”
“You and I should do it,” Charlotte says. “And then I’ll give it to her tomorrow on Christmas Day.”
“Fine. I don’t know how easy it is to buy a car for someone. Does she have a driver’s license? Is she insurable? No DWIs or other arrests? You can’t drive it without insurance.”
“Her last car was a Harley-Davidson. And I don’t feel comfortable riding around on that, so I want to get the car. I have a copy of her license and Social Security number, and if need be, we can put my name on it too.”
“Fine thing.”
“I just want to give her this. A gift outright. Like the Robert Frost poem. I’m going to write the poem out and leave it on the front seat.”
“Sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“I want to be clear,” Charlotte says. “This is what they call pay for play; I’m not coming home in the way that you want me to come home.”
“I understand. Are you spending the night?” he asks, phone still tucked under his chin. At this moment he has some leverage.
“Yes.”
“Where are you sleeping?”
“On my side of the bed.”
“And where am I sleeping?” he asks.
“It’s not like I wanted to hurt anyone, I hope you know that,” Charlotte says. “I feel terrible about all of it. It’s the most awful thing I’ve ever had to do, and I’m sure now she thinks I am against her or that I have no feeling for her and that’s not true. What’s true is that we don’t really know each other. Hopefully over time we will form a new relationship. She’s the only child I have, and despite everything, I have tried hard to be a good mother.”
“You have been a wonderful mother.”
She says nothing.
“A fine mother,” he says.
“At least now it all makes sense,” Charlotte says.
He looks out the window; Meghan is in the pool swimming determined laps back and forth down the middle of the pool.
When he’s off the phone, the Big Guy calls Godzich, and tells him about the car. Godzich says he’ll call the dealer and get things going. Then the Big Guy says, “On a more personal note, I need the contact information for my old friend Irene.”
There’s a silence.
“Irene, from the dentist’s office.”
“I’ll locate that and call you back,” Godzich says.
Five minutes later Godzich calls. “I have an address and a phone number.”
“Just the phone, thanks.”
“I have some personal details if that’s helpful.”
“Like what?”
“Additional information.”
“Go ahead.”
“She’s married with children.”
There’s a pause.
“Good for her,” the Big Guy says. “What’s the number?” Godzich gives him the number. The Big Guy writes it on an index card and slips it into his back pocket.
Meghan is still in the pool. She has been swimming laps for hours, as though the motion will help her process things. She’s swimming, always swimming. The water is her think tank. She is swimming under; she is swimming through. She is swimming laps and thinking of Charlotte. She is thinking of Charlotte and of all the ways she tries to be like Charlotte.
Meghan has been replaying the meeting she went to last night. As much as Charlotte was not a warm, cuddly parent, she tried very hard. Charlotte was always teaching Meghan something. Meghan had no sense that Charlotte was withholding—she just thought that’s who Charlotte was and that this was as much affection as one got from her.
Theirs was a life lived by rules. Charlotte believed that manners were a path through anything. Charlotte told her that etiquette was helpful because it was a guidepost you could turn to when you didn’t know what to say or what to do. There would be those moments, times when one is at a loss; that’s just the way life is. Things would take you by surprise. Be prepared.
Meghan is swimming and remembering things she and Charlotte did—long horseback rides at the ranch, mother and daughter spa adventures, Charlotte taking her for a mani-pedi and Meghan feeling so grown-up. The two of them bought matching purses, or dresses and shoes; these things meant to her that they were attached, they had something in common. She is thinking of Charlotte and the Girl Scouts—her mother was a Brownie briefly and got her into it, selling cookies, hosting meetings when she was younger and they lived in Connecticut.
Those were times Meghan felt that her mother was giving her useful lessons in how to be a woman.
Charlotte often reminded Meghan to pay attention to the outside world; the life cycle of the natural world is a source of comfort and regularity.
Meghan is thinking of Charlotte and plants. She was always planting something, always tending to something, an African violet or an orchid. She was in conversation with plants. At the ranch there was a shelf in the pantry where Charlotte’s dormant orchids rested. Multiple pots of orchids with labels indicating when they last bloomed. When she was not at the ranch, one of the people who worked there managed them for her. There was nothing she liked less than people failing to care for the plants. The plants were like children, dependent on humans for survival. “It’s our minimal duty to water them, to give them the key ingredients of life,” Charlotte had been known to say.
Was Charlotte always like that or was that something that came after the baby? If she couldn’t keep her own child alive, could she keep an orchid alive? Remembering that her mother’s absolute pleasure and actual tears when an orchid rebloomed seemed odd at the time, Meghan now realizes that her mother’s disproportionately large emotion for a plant made sense.
As she is swimming, Meghan is thinking of Charlotte and nature. She is thinking of Charlotte on the ranch, riding, her love of horses. Her affection for the barn cat. One day they went to see the horses, and the cat had clearly been in a fight and its eye was a mess. Her mother quickly picked up the cat, brought it inside, and cleaned the wound. The cat lost sight in the eye but survived without any infection and seemed eternally grateful. For however strict and rule-bound she was, Charlotte didn’t tolerate neglect.
Meghan is thinking of Charlotte and the drinking. When did it begin? Was it just a simple thing, a social tool that got out of hand? When did it turn into a problem? Did she ever try to stop drinking before? Why now? Was it really because John McCain lost? Meghan doesn’t have a sense of what’s behind it. Her parents do a good job of keeping everything hidden.
Meghan is thinking about the meeting, about the stories she heard, about her emotions that she’s finding hard to locate. She can’t be angry with Charlotte; how can you be angry with someone who is suffering? She can’t be angry with Charlotte because it will just make things worse; it will drive Charlotte away when she needs to pull Charlotte close and treat her as an injured bird. If it seems heroic that she’s not thinking about herself, it’s not; it’s easier to focus on what she can do for others.
When Meghan comes in from the pool, she asks her father, “Did you call yet?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“Yes.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You blew up my life. Mom needed to do it for her survival and you need to do this for me.” Her bathing suit is dripping onto the terrazzo floor. The drops land with a soft splash.
“I’m aware.”
He excuses himself and goes into his office. It was his bad behavior. Irene was young, warm, generous. In the end he couldn’t do any of the things that a man should do: make the situation right, marry her. She was a religious girl—she wasn’t going to have an abortion, so the next best thing was to bring the baby into his life. He told his lawyer to arrange it. He told Charlotte that he’d heard through the grapevine of a young woman in a bad situation. He didn’t mention that the situation was of his own making. He left out the key detail, but Charlotte found out. The day they went to sign the papers, it became clear, and Charlotte, to her credit, didn’t flinch. She could have said no. She could have backed out of the deal; instead, she became steely quiet and signed on the dotted line.
At the time he admired her for her “strength.” That’s how he expressed it to Tony all those years ago. “The woman has extraordinary strength.” In retrospect, he’s not sure that was the right word.
He pulls the index card out of his back pocket and dials. The phone rings four times—a machine answers. He immediately hangs up and hopes they don’t have caller ID.
“No answer,” he tells Meghan. “I’ll try again in a little while.”
“What does she look like? Do you have any pictures?” Meghan asks. The Big Guy seems so shocked by the question that you’d think she was talking about pornography.
“No,” he says. It never occurred to him that he would have a picture of her. He has a file on her somewhere. He distinctly remembers it as something he didn’t keep in the vault—a manila folder marked Irene with a copy of the birth certificate. The birth certificate doesn’t have his name on it; they talked about that ahead of time. There are records confirming that money was sent to Irene and there’s a letter from the lawyer. He made every effort to keep things as clean as possible, transactional. When he thinks about it now, he wonders if the word transactional might be a synonym for asshole. When he was seeing her, he often sent flowers. He would call the florist and tell the woman what the card should say. He gave her some gifts, a nice pearl bracelet and a few other things. He was grateful for her, but the relationship wasn’t as long or momentous as you might think. It wasn’t a courtship; it wasn’t a love affair; it was grief counseling.
“What color are her eyes?”
“Brown, I think.” He pauses. “She had a nice smile; she worked for the dentist. Her hair was like yours, full and wavy.”
“More details, please,” Meghan says.
“She was pretty and very nice.” Everything he says sounds bland, generic. Why doesn’t he have more to say?
“Try calling again,” Meghan says about an hour later.
“Right.” He gets up to leave the room.
“You can’t do it in front of me?”
“No, I can’t.”
“I don’t trust you,” Meghan says.
“Too bad.” He walks away. He’s clearly uncomfortable as well.
“Are you really calling her?”
“Of course I’m calling her. Who else would I be calling?”
“What are you going to say?”
“No idea. I’ll have to improvise.”
This time he remembers to block his caller ID. The phone rings twice before a young voice answers. When he asks for Irene, the voice shouts, “Mom, it’s for you.”
“Hello?”
What does he say? “You know what they say about Christmas surprises . . .”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Oh, sorry, it’s me,” he says. Does she even recognize his voice? He could have had Godzich call first, but there are some things you have to do for yourself. “It’s me. Your old friend. I’m sorry to intrude but . . .”
She makes an audible sound of surprise, distress.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”
“Yes,” she says. “Very. Oh, wow.” He can hear her moving around, her hand over the receiver. “Carolina, watch your brother.” He hears doors opening and her going into another room.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” she says. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not sick? I’ve had a few of those lately, a friend with breast cancer . . .” She babbles on for a bit then stops.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m fine. Healthy as a horse.” He laughs.
“It’s not funny.”
“Of course it’s not.”
There’s a pause.
“I’m calling about the girl.” He pauses. “The cat’s out of the bag and we need to talk.” Another long pause. “Charlotte told Meghan that she’s not her natural child. Meghan has questions; she wants to meet you. She’s a lovely kid, first-rate, smart, beautiful, good at school, never a day of trouble. We’re very proud of her. She’s a senior in high school now.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
He says nothing. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.
“Of all the days to call,” she says.
“It wasn’t my first choice. She’s on school break.”
“We’re leaving in the morning for Disney World.”
“Nice,” he says. “The Magic Kingdom. When are you back?”
“New Year’s Eve.”
“I think you’ll like her.”
There’s another long silence.
“New Year’s Day?” he says.
“I’ll meet you in the morning. My husband sleeps late.”
“We knew this moment would come.”
She says nothing. She is busy packing bags for Christmas at Disney World.
“I’m sorry it’s awkward,” he says.
He could have not called. He could have hemmed and hawed and stalled for time. He could have just given her number to Meghan and left her to do it herself.
“Thank you for calling,” she says. And she means it.
When he opens the door, Meghan is sitting on the floor. “New Year’s Day. We’ll meet her then.”
“Was she excited?”
“Very,” he says, hoping that in this instance excited can stand in for shocked and caught off guard.
“The way you pitched me sounds like I’m for sale—good-natured, never gave you a day of trouble.”
“What?”
“I was listening at the door. The words you used sounded like a sales pitch. Are you trying to give me back to her?” Meghan starts to cry.
“Sweetie, that’s not what I was saying. I just wanted her to know how proud we are and how much we love you. We’re not selling you or giving you back; I’m just trying to take care of things, doing the best I can.”
“It’s gross,” Meghan says.
He hugs her. Her damp swimsuit presses against him, leaving an outline of a crying girl on the old man.
“She’s going to Disney World tomorrow,” he says. “That’s why it has to wait.”
“We’ve been to Disney World. Remember how much Mom hated everything except the scariest roller coaster?”
“Yes,” he says. “Between you and me, I never understood that—but some things are best left a mystery.”
There is a long pause.
“Mom is coming home.”
“Is she staying?”
“Yes, she’ll be with us overnight; that’s all she can do for now. And Tony is coming this afternoon. Should we go out for dinner? Melvyn’s? Steak Diane and onion rings?”
Meghan shakes her head. “I’ll make dinner. I just want to be home with everyone. And later we can go to church.”
“Okay. We’ll go to Midnight Mass. I’m sure there’s a church out here somewhere. Meanwhile, I’m going to take your mother into town.” Every time he says it—the word mother—he feels uncomfortable. Is that the right word, mother? Is he supposed to call her Charlotte now? He can’t do it. As far as he is concerned, she is Mother. “We have some errands to run. Last-minute stuff.”
