The doors opened. We had only gone two floors. “This is the strangest sensation,” I said.
“What is?” Jonathan was still holding my arm. I could tell he was starting to worry about me.
“A stranger hunting you down in the Met,” Eddie said, answering for me. “I didn’t even know why I was following you at first. Well, you do look like your mother.”
“I don’t look like my mother.” My mother, like my sister, hasreal beauty, the kind that did not succumb to time.
“You do,” Jonathan said with some reluctance. He wasn’t fond of my mother, who was so fond of him.
Eddie agreed. “You’ve got her height, her confidence, the way you walk is like your mother.”
“There’s the laugh, too,” Jonathan said.
“I don’t laugh like my mother,” I said.
Eddie shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t think I was following your mother. Your mother is my age.” He stopped himself, struck by a thought. “Is your mother still—”
“Very much.”
He nodded. “Good, good. All I can say is that I knew you were someone I knew and I couldn’t quite remember where I knew you from. One gets to be a certain age and this happens. By the time I was following you up the stairs, I had the terrible thought that you might be a famous actress or a soprano and I was pursuing you. I didn’t know you’d seen me. I think of myself as blending in with the crowd.”
“Believe me,” I said. “I never would have seen you.”
“I saw you,” Jonathan said.
I tilted my head in the direction of my husband. “He’s more aware of his surroundings than I am.”
“Good for you,” Eddie said. “That’s how we manage in the city. Do the two of you live here?”
“Westchester,” I said.
“Bronxville,” Jonathan said, getting specific. We were in line for a table. He gave his name to the hostess.
“That’s the dream,” Eddie said. “See some trees and grass first thing in the morning. See a squirrel, fill the bird feeders, drive a car. I always thought the day would come when I would leave,but I never left. I tell myself I have to live here. I go out a lot at night.”
“Now that you’re retired?” Jonathan asked. Now that Jonathan was retired, he thought everyone should retire. He thought I should retire.
But Eddie disappointed him. “No, no. Not retired in the least. I went to the office this morning right on schedule, but when I got there, they were doing some sort of work on a water main, no idea what it was. They’d shut the tap off for the whole building, sent everyone home, or I should say sent everyone home who was there in the first place. The young people prefer being remote. They like to work in bed with their dogs. But for me, no water means a free day. I thought, When’s the last time I went to the Met? It was a whim. I came on a whim.”
Eddie Triplett was the same age as my mother, and my mother was seventy-six. That much I knew.
“What do you do?” my husband asked, which saved me having to ask the question.
Eddie was an editor at Random House.
People make romantic reference to their own leaping hearts, but at that moment I would say my heart leapt. He was still an editor. He made a game of it when my sister and I were children. He’d say, “When the kids at school ask you what your stepfather does, what do you tell them?”
“Eddie’s aneditor!” we’d scream.
He said the junior editors were all called Eddie, unless they were women, in which case they were called Edie, and the senior editors were either Ed or Edwina, and the guy at the tip-top of the heap who was known as the chief, he was an Edward. Unfortunately there was no woman at the top of the heap. He said itwould be our job to try to change that. Eddie and my mother both worked at Houghton Mifflin publishers in Boston—that’s where they’d met—he in editorial, of course, given his name, and she in publicity, given her propensity for talking on the phone and throwing parties. When she sent Eddie packing, she insisted that he leave not only our house and our family, but his job as well.
“I’m not going to work every day to see my ex-husband in the break room,” she said.
But didn’t that punishment far exceed the crime, whatever the crime had been? “You can’t do that! You can’t make him quit hisjob!” Where would someone thrown out of the profession he was named for ever find work? At the time, I didn’t understand that there was more than one publishing house in the country. I thought all books came from Houghton Mifflin.
Did I say this to my mother or only think it? In the way of all children, I believed the fault for their divorce was mine, though in this case I really was to blame. The past had happened such a long time ago, and while I wasn’t square on the details, it seemed we had all come out fine.
The hostess took us to our table, and Jonathan and I both ordered a cup of breakfast tea and a slice of almond cake to share.
