Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"Look, I just need to get into the apartment. Mom wants the standing lamp from the bedroom." Annie hesitated, then said, "From her bedroom."

There was silence.

"Josie?"

"Okay. Right. I'll have Ozzie bring it down for you. Any day you say."

Ozzie was the handyman. Annie wondered if Ozzie missed her mother.

"That's okay," she said. "I have a key. I just wanted to let you know."

"Mmm," Josie said. "Well, actually, I had the locks changed."

Annie said, "What?" but she had heard him.

"It just seemed prudent," he said.

"Jesus, Josie."

"I know."

"Prudent? Jesus."

Then neither of them said anything. And neither one hung up.

"I'm sorry, honey," Josie finally murmured. "I'm so sorry."

Annie was in her office. It was a small room in the back of the building on the ground floor. There was a window that faced a wall covered with ivy. The window needed to be washed. Her back was aching. She hadn't gone swimming in a week. It was getting too cold, even with a wet suit. Maybe tomorrow she would go to the Y. She thought these things, noticed the shaft of thin city light that slanted in through the window and landed on her desk, but what she really thought was Oh, Josie. Josie, how could you?

"When are you coming?" he asked.

"Saturday."

"Right. Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Annie thought, This is the man who brought me up, the man who was a father to me.

"Look, have dinner with me, okay?" Josie said. "You and Miranda?"

Annie was about to say no when he added in a truly pathetic voice, "Please?"

Now she and Miranda were driving into the city to pick up a useless lamp and have dinner with a useless father-manque.

"I hate him," Miranda said. "Why are we doing this?"

"Beats me. I weakened, I guess. His voice… it was heartbreaking."

"Hmmph." Miranda crossed her arms and held them against her chest, pouting. "I think men are big babies."

"Infantile grandiosity. I've always liked the sound of that. Rolls off the tongue."

"But real children aren't grandiose. They're actually grand. Look at Henry, for example."

Annie pictured Henry on the floor of the living room, four adults gazing adoringly at him as he pushed a car in circles. She remembered, too, a moment later in that same day. Henry had fallen asleep with Betty on the couch. Kit and Miranda, returning from a walk, had just come up the battered cement steps, leaving the door from the outside to the sunporch open. Annie was at the window facing the sunporch, picking dead roses from a bunch Kit had brought them a week earlier, and she was just aware of them, in the corner of her vision. They stood, one on each side of the door. Kit put out his hand and touched Miranda on the shoulder, a gentle, single, petting motion, like the soft swat of a cat. And they had both laughed softly and privately.

Annie wished she had not witnessed this scene. It meant that much more worry. She had always worried about Miranda. Even when Miranda was riding high, Annie had kept an eye on her younger sister. It was a remnant of childhood-a wariness of her sister, who demanded so much and seemed to devour the bulk of their parents' attention. It was also a source of power for Annie, a self-protective self-importance that translated into an almost prim protectiveness of Miranda. She had understood this even as a little girl. If Annie did not look after Miranda, what other role was there for her? Only resentment, and resentment was such an uncomfortable sentiment. Annie loved Miranda, found her impossible not to love, and very early on she had discovered a way to love her with dignity: worry.

Such good friends, Annie told herself when she saw Kit and Miranda that day from the sunporch. Friends, she thought again, trying to convince herself. And then, unable to hold out against her own eyes, the admission: lovers. She'd felt suddenly envious of Miranda and sorry for her all at once.

But as soon as Kit and Miranda came into the living room, it was as if the handsome young man at her side vanished. Miranda stood before the sofa, her face, that lively, determined face, shifting, suddenly and beautifully. A transformation, Annie thought at the time. Peace, she thought. Miranda at peace. And she had followed her sister's gaze, an almost palpable emanation of simple, complete happiness, to its destination, a small child, blinking, sucking his thumb, his pretty mouth curling in a smile around his little fist.

"How is little Henry, anyway?" Annie asked now as they drove against the shimmer of the setting sun.

Miranda said nothing.

Perhaps she had not heard. Annie glanced at her silent sister, profiled against the window, her sunglasses hiding her eyes.

Impassive, wordless, Miranda turned to face the window and the passing prickly November woods beyond.

Annie did not repeat the question.

Josie was meeting them at a tiny bistro they had all liked "when the family was intact," as Miranda put it. "He could have chosen a more neutral place."

"I don't think he wants to be neutral."

"Fat chance," Miranda said.

"That he can be or that he wants to be?"

"I don't know, Annie. Why do you always have to make so much sense? You know what I mean."

And Annie, after a moment of reflexive annoyance, had to admit that, yes, she did know exactly what her sister meant.

Josie had not yet arrived, but their table was ready, their usual table; he must have requested it, for the restaurant was busy. They sat and waited, neither of them sure what her feelings were. Then he walked in, and they were overcome by waves of love, embarrassment, and penetrating anger.

He looked older and younger at the same time. What is that about? Annie wondered. She had not seen him in months, and here he was, her Josie, smaller somehow, grayer, thinner, but his step was so jaunty, the way he moved his arms, so light and carefree. How dare he be carefree when her mother could barely walk beneath her load of care?

"I miss you girls," he said.

"Whose fault is that?" Miranda said.

Joseph stared at his two daughters, his little girls. Miranda sat with crossed arms, her lower lip jutting out, the way she had when she was truly a little girl. She glared at him, which was on the whole less unsettling than Annie, who did not even look at him. Oh, what had he done? His whole life was gone, just like that. Betty was gone, Betty and her picnics. It had been their joke, that she turned everything into a picnic. She turned everything into an outing, even a trip to the motor vehicles bureau to turn in the license plates of their old car. Oh, we'll go together, she had said. Let's go to the one downtown! We'll take a walk along the water, see the ships like the tourists. It's not a picnic, he had said, as he so often did. They could have had such a nice old age, an old age full of unlikely picnics. But picnics were old-fashioned entertainments, and he wasn't ready for his old age. Felicity had reached down a firm young hand and fished him out of that murky bog.

"I don't think it's legal to lock Mom out of the apartment," Annie said. "And if it is legal, it's not ethical, Josie. It really isn't."

"But your mother agreed to it," Joseph said. "I discussed it with her."

"I beg your pardon?" Annie was really shocked. Betty had never mentioned it.

"What possessed her to do that?" Miranda said. "And why do you want the locks changed anyway? It's not like we're going in there to ransack the place. The place that is her home, by the way."

"Oh," Joseph said vaguely. "It's just protocol. Anyway, I'm living there, and I need my privacy. I'm entitled to my privacy, aren't I?" He looked at them, hurt.

"Well, you're entitled, anyway," Miranda muttered.

"I just want to have a nice dinner," he said. "That's all. A nice dinner."