“Well, don’t get me started. If you talk about the car accident, I’m going to get mad at Eddie again, and this is not the day for me to be mad at Eddie.”
“She’s got a point,” I said, and got up to see if there was any coffee left in the pot.
I had invited our mother to stay with us in Bronxville, but she said that anyone who had the opportunity to stay in the city would choose to do so. The only advantage to Bronxville was Jonathan, as our mother greatly preferred my husband to Leda’s. Jonathan, she said, was naturally gregarious and fluent in all matters medical, a topic of conversation she particularly enjoyed, while Steve was remote and had a tendency to disappear even when he was in the room with you. Still, when everything went on the scale, an Upper West Side apartment with a park view and Steve made a more compelling package than Bronxville and Jonathan.
Even with the two and a half hours allotted, we ended up having to wait. Steve and Jonathan came back from the park. Steve took a shower and then joined us while we drank our coffee. We sat in the living room, my sister and I with our husbands, and waited for our mother.
“I’m going to call for a car,” Steve said, looking at his phone.
“Don’t do it,” Leda said. “It will only be more frustrating if the car is waiting, too.”
There was nothing particularly egregious about our mother’s behavior, but the four of us were out of practice. Steve’s mother had died when he was in college, Jonathan’s mother had been gone for two years, and Leda and I rarely had to deal with our mother because she favored her sons from her third marriage.
“My mother was the opposite,” Jonathan said. “If we were supposed to leave the house at ten o’clock, she’d be sitting alonein the car at nine thirty, waiting. As far as she was concerned, being on time was the same thing as being late.”
“Your mother was very conscientious,” I said.
“What about the happy medium?” Steve said. “The one where you leave the house at the hour you agreed to leave?”
But then she was there in her blue silk blouse and billowy trousers, two tasteful gold chains lying flat against her neck, impeccable makeup. “Is everyone ready?” she asked, as if she were the one who’d been waiting.
“We are now,” my husband said. He stood and held out his hand and she took his hand. She loved him so much more than Steve, who was on his phone now, ordering the car. That was the way it went in families. Everyone had their part.
The four of us would have taken the subway to Chelsea, but there were five of us and so an extra-large SUV was ordered.
“Look at you,” Eddie said when we came through the door. He went right to our mother, took her in his arms. “Look at my beautiful ex-wife.”
I could see Eddie’s apartment through my mother’s eyes. She had always wanted to live in the city, but this place wouldn’t have been anywhere near big enough for all of us—that was what she was thinking. Raising her family, she would have needed Leda’s apartment. But now Chelsea was chic, and a place like this would be big enough if it were only the two of them.
There they stood, entwined, while Leda and I looked on and our husbands looked away. It had been one possible scenario—Eddie and Abigail—which could have worked had every single thing about them been different.
“I thought you’d be sick,” our mother said. “Daphne said you’ve been sick, but you look perfectly fine to me.”
“You’re very kind,” Eddie said. He continued to hold both her hands.
“The girls exaggerate everything,” she said. “The boys don’t do that. Turns out what they say about boys is true, they’re easier.”
“I’ve found that to be the case,” Eddie said, and our mother whooped out a laugh. He had caught her off her guard.
On the other side of the room, my sister put her hand in mine.
“You have wonderful children,” Eddie said, then added for good measure, “You’ve been a wonderful mother.”
Eddie had no idea if she’d been a wonderful mother, or he based his assessment on the years he had seen her in the role, or it was one of those meaningless things one says to fill a conversational space. Or maybe he was right. Again, I remembered what Leda had told me about bravery and resilience. Leda and I were happy, after all. We’d made good lives with men who loved us. We liked our work. We were, for the most part, remarkably untroubled by the past.
Eddie took my mother around the apartment. In the kitchen, he introduced her to Marta, his housekeeper, who had come to serve lunch and then clean up. Marta sat on a stool scrolling through her phone, and when he said her name, she looked up and waved. He showed my mother the bedroom. We didn’t follow them there, but we could hear them laughing. Jonathan looked at me in alarm. When they came back to the living room, Eddie took her to the case of books he had edited. She pulled one from the shelf. “Thiswas you?” she asked, opening it up. A huge bestseller, prizewinner, a book that everyone had read.
“I didn’t write it.”
“But you brought it into the world.” She hugged the book toher chest. “I loved this book so much.” She put it back and took out another, marveling. “This one, too?”
“That one I may as well have written,” Eddie said. “That one I take full credit for.”
She shook her head. “You were a brilliant editor. Even when you were in that little closet at Houghton. You were better than any of them.”
“I wasn’t, but thank you.”
“I’m serious. I envy you your career. After Lucas and I got married, I dropped out. They promised to bring me back to work on his books, but then there were no more books. The next thing I knew, I was home with two new babies. I didn’t know anybody anymore. There was no way I could keep up.” She couldn’t stop staring at the book’s cover. “I loved publishing. I wish I’d stayed.”
