Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

It is too hot for velvet was Annie's first irrelevant thought, remembering many sweaty holiday dinners from her childhood. Rosh Hashanah is always too hot for velvet.

The night air swept in through the door with Frederick, Gwen, her husband, and the two pink little girls in cherry red velvet, the damp breath of the shore following them across the room like a ghost.

"New blood," Rosalyn whispered hungrily as she hurried toward the newcomers. She frequently experienced a sense of world-weary ennui with her husband's guests. Like many a collector of pottery or butterflies or vintage handbags, Rosalyn cared far more for the act of acquisition than she did for the guests in her extensive collection. Lou provided her with an ever-expanding list of names to remember and occupations to place in her own mental hierarchy, for which she was grudgingly grateful. But this new acquisition was, uncharacteristically, all her own. She had found Gwendolyn Barrow herself at a dreary evening of incomprehensible art and clannish New Yorkers at which the two bored women had fallen into a friendly discussion of Pilates versus Gyrotonic, Rosalyn coming down heavily, if such a slight and narrow person could be said to be heavy in any way, on the side of Gyrotonic, a view to which Gwen revealed she was just coming around. The two women bonded, and Rosalyn rather recklessly invited her new friend to Lou's Rosh Hashanah.

"Gwen!" she said. "Welcome to Westport! And who are these elegant young ladies you've brought with you? They cannot be Juliet and Ophelia?" Gwen and Rosalyn had met just the one time, and Rosalyn congratulated herself on remembering the names of the twins. Her father might be lazily indulging himself in senility, she thought, but she could still hold her head up. "It's not possible, they're so grown up…" she continued, her immense face tilting toward the girls.

Juliet and Ophelia looked up at her with expressions that suggested they would rather have met the fates of their famous namesakes than be standing in Rosalyn's living room beneath the looming face of Rosalyn. Then Juliet and Ophelia began to cry, their little lips quivering a moment in unison before twisting into twin grimaces. They wailed in chorus, and their father squatted down and spoke earnestly to them, his face serious but deferential, as if they were tiny ambassadors from a tiny foreign land.

From her post near the glass doors to the terrace, Annie saw the family's entrance, felt the damp air. Her heart beat faster, and the heat of emotion spread across her face. She concentrated on her glass of wine, the liquid black as a deep, round pond. She waited for Frederick's voice, and when it came, beside her, saying just her name, it sounded soft and rich and aromatic.

"Your voice is like wine," she said, looking up and smiling. "It really is, Frederick."

"Not demon gin?" he said. He took her hand and they stood for a moment, a very heady moment for Annie, her blood coursing through her, drowning out the sounds around her. But Frederick must have heard something, for he glanced quickly, self-consciously, at his daughter across the room, and the spell was broken.

He dropped Annie's hand awkwardly, said, "What on earth are you doing here?" then looked around him as if he weren't sure what he was doing there, either. "What a wonderful surprise!"

"Cousin Lou is my cousin," she said.

"Cousin Lou is everybody's cousin, isn't he? Gwen heard all about him from his wife. They're great friends, I gather. After one meeting. Gwen is a terrible snob, but she's very taken with Rosalyn. Is Rosalyn a terrible snob? It's the only thing I can think of to explain this sudden friendship."

Annie couldn't help laughing. "But Lou's really my cousin," she insisted. "Not by blood exactly, but he really is family."

Frederick nodded enthusiastically. "Right! Just what Gwennie told me-everyone is 'like family.'"

Annie gave up, adding only, "Anyway, I live here now."

"Oh, I remember now… the cottage, your cousin… So Cousin Lou is your cousin and you live in his cottage."

She wondered if he was thinking of her apartment, of her bedroom, of her bed. If he was remembering.

"We live just down the hill."

"By the beach, right? That's fantastic. My house is by the water." He looked suddenly uncomfortable. He tapped his mouth unconsciously with two fingers. "My house…"

"Your house…" she said, the way you would to encourage a child who was trying to tell a story.

"Hmm?"

"Your house? The water?"

"My house," he said again, more to himself than to Annie. "My house by the water. Dark and treacherous…"

"Your house or the water?"

"… Darker and more treacherous by the day…"

"You sound like my sister!"

"Yes, but she finds darkness and treachery beautiful."

"And you?"

"I find it dark and treacherous…" He trailed off, then said, suddenly, with a rather forced grin, "Well! Enough of that. So you're here because you live here, and I'm here because Gwennie met Mrs. Cousin Lou at the Whitney. They're bosom buddies." He smiled, more pleasantly now. "That's an expression that doesn't really work anymore, does it? Pity. It conveys so much if you're a man's man of a previous century. I can't quite carry it off."

Annie felt herself relax. She liked him, she just did. Whether Frederick wanted to remember what had happened between them or not, she did remember, and she would continue to remember-why not remember something so pleasurable? But that did not mean she would look back. At her age, she found that it was better to keep her eyes facing forward.

"Isn't Westport where Peter DeVries lived?" Frederick asked. "I miss his presence. How does that happen, I wonder? His books still exist, they're still just as wonderful as ever, but he has no presence. Do you know what I mean?"

Annie said she did know what he meant and wondered if what he really meant was: When will I have no presence? Frederick was sixty or thereabouts. Was he feeling that shift, too, the way she was? The cresting of the hill? Down, down, down we go from here…

"Lucy lived in Westport," she said, shaking herself from what was threatening to become full-blown melancholy. "On TV after Little Ricky was born. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit lived here, too."

"And now you: Annie Weissmann."

"An unbroken line of unrelated people."

Annie began to enjoy herself. She described the nostalgia her mother and sister had expressed for the local lunatic asylum.

"And my sister almost drowned in a kayak and was rescued by a young actor," she continued. They proceeded to discuss kayaks and boats in general for a while, the conversation then veering inexplicably to a shared appreciation for the actor James Mason, whom they both occasionally confused with Dirk Bogarde.

"I was once thinking about that scene, that wonderful, ghastly scene in Death in Venice in which Gustav von Aschenbach's makeup begins to run," Frederick said. "Then, days later, I realized that the entire time I had been picturing the makeup running down James Mason's face."

From across the room came a shout: "Dad!"

It was Frederick's son-in-law. Annie felt a stab of pity for Frederick: his son-in-law called him "Dad."

I often think about Gustav von Aschenbach when I put on my own makeup, she thought, though she might have said it aloud, for Frederick stared at her.

"Dad! There you are," said Frederick's daughter, arriving beside them with her husband and little girls. "Oh, hello," Gwen added hastily to Annie. "You're the librarian, aren't you? Ann, is it? How nice to see you here of all places." Gwen was holding one daughter who chewed dreamily on a cracker.

"Of all places," Annie repeated.

"This is Ron, my son-in-law, and this small person," Frederick said, reaching for the child, "is Ophelia."