Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"I knew I could trust you. He speaks so highly of you."

"Does he?" Annie felt Amber watching her, scrutinizing her, looking for clues. She breathed as regularly as she could and looked Amber in the eye. Freddie, indeed. "Well, I think very highly of Frederick, too."

Amber bit her plump lower lip and nodded. It was a proprietary gesture, an acknowledgment that others might well admire what was hers. She offered Annie a piece of gum from a blister pack and, when Annie refused, popped three pieces into her own mouth. The smell of artificial fruit, which Annie associated with air fresheners in public bathrooms, wafted over from the gum.

"How do you know Frederick? If you don't mind my asking."

"Oh no, I totally don't. It's one of the things I really need to share with you. So, Crystal and I were home-sitting for him. He has this gorgeous home in Massachusetts. On the water and everything. But then Crystal was at this seminar."

Amber stopped and looked uncomfortable.

"She's a student, too?" Annie asked. She had no idea where this private meeting under the blazing sun was going, but she wanted to move it along.

"Crystal? Yeah. She's going for her certificate to be a life coach. And so she was gone, right? And then Freddie came back unexpectedly, and well, it just sort of happened." She paused and assumed a dreamy expression.

Annie listened in a fog of abstracted fascination. She could scarcely understand the words formed by Amber's pretty lips, much less believe them, yet of course she heard and of course she knew it was absolutely true. Frederick, her Frederick, though he was hers only in her imagination and her memory, her Frederick and this girl. "I'm not sure why you're telling me this," she said as politely as she could. Although she was quite sure of one reason. Amber was staking her claim, planting her flag, and at the same time doing a little reconnaissance of the enemy lines. You really are a general at war, Annie thought. But I am not your enemy. I'm the war-torn village, the smoking rubble abandoned by all but the crows.

"It was such a coincidence when I saw you here! I feel this heavy burden, in more ways than one, believe me, and there you were. It just seemed so perfect. Like, ordained almost. I super hate having this secret."

"But why is it a secret at all?"

Amber gave a bitter sigh. "His family."

Annie almost laughed. Yes, they would be a problem.

"I've never met them, right? But I can tell already that Gwendolyn is very possessive. Very, very possessive. And controlling. Freddie practically told me. And the son-he just wants Freddie in New York. They both do."

"But there's nothing wrong with wanting to be close to your father."

"They just want him at their dinner parties to impress their friends. Believe me, I know the type. He's a celebrity, you know. In that world, anyway. You have to have an artistic sense to get what I mean. Have you ever read any of his books?"

Annie nodded.

"Oh. Well, I haven't. Yet. They're not my thing, instinctively, if you know what I mean, but they're very impressive. I mean, he's won prizes. His children treat him like a trophy." She laughed: "'Trophy Dad!' I never thought of that one before."

Annie did not laugh. She wondered if the night Frederick came home unexpectedly was the night of the library reading. I had to thank you, he'd said, coming back to her. I'll call you, he'd said. No wonder he had never called. This girl had been there, at his house, waiting for him like a girlish spider. Annie gave Amber a new appraisal-the perfect, slender curves, the young vibrant skin, the almost pretty face, the general overwhelming aura of youth and health and life. And how astute Amber turned out to be, as well. Trophy Dad. Yes, she was dead on about that, this formidable bimboesque person.

"Those kids of his take him for granted. They're after his money, too, trust me. And free babysitting. I've seen it before."

As Amber seemed to have finished, Annie parted her lips in preparation for speech, but what was there to say? What was there, even, to think? Frederick was the man who turned to her in bed and recited all of Sonnet 116. Frederick was the brother of the woman who had stolen her mother's life. Frederick was the lover of this coy yet oddly earnest girl.

"They would never approve of me," Amber resumed, very agitated now. "I'm only twenty-two years old!"

More like thirty, Annie thought uncharitably. Either way, she was far too young for Frederick Barrow. She could just picture Gwendolyn's tight, suspicious face at the sight of Amber and the panda tattoo on her arm. She felt suddenly sorry for Amber.

"But, I mean, he is a grown man," Annie said, finding her voice at last. "He certainly doesn't need his children's approval to have a"-she stumbled, looking for the right word-"girlfriend," she said.

"But don't you see?" Amber took both of Annie's hot swollen hands in her own young smooth ones. "It's different now. I mean, because, you know, we're engaged."

Annie did a double take. She couldn't help it.

"You and Frederick are engaged?"

"We are. You see…" Amber leaned close to Annie now and whispered shyly in her ear: "I'm pregnant."

Beneath a garish blue sky, Annie made her way quickly across the synthetic golf-course terrain. It was unimaginable, this story of Amber's. She, at least, had never imagined it. In what world could Frederick, her Frederick, even Felicity's Frederick, be the father of Amber's child?

In this world, this very one, the one with clean-shaven lawns and exaggerated sunlight. It was unimaginable, and yet it was true. Like so many stories, the stories she never read, the stories Miranda liked so much. Palm trees spread out before her, their tall, curved trunks and symmetrical spray of fronds, such platitudes, like cartoons, like doodles, like a neon sign.

Frederick was going to marry Amber.

Annie had been so careful these last months to view her relationship with Frederick in the clearest light of the clearest day: he was drawn to her, he liked her; he was a man who had lived alone for a long time and seemed to like it that way; his children wanted him unencumbered by a wife, by a rival for their affections, their control, their inheritance; his wide-eyed sister had torn apart her mother's life. Annie had shone the light of reality on what she knew was an unlikely match, Annie Weissmann and Frederick Barrow. She had talked to herself and explained the situation in all its unpromising detail. She had also, she now knew, fallen in love.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be more accurate to say that love had fallen, fallen like a log in her path. And she had tripped over it. Still, she'd landed on her feet, hadn't she? In an attempt to illustrate how much better suited for sorrow her sister was than she, Miranda sometimes dismissively declared that Annie always landed on her feet, like a cat. Annie sighed and thought of a cat's pretty little feet, so dainty and treacherous. She did not feel like a cat. Her feet did not feel like a cat's paws. They felt flat and enormous and abused, the dead feet of an old and weary waitress.

The tears came. They evaporated in the heat. They reappeared. They disappeared again. Everything dies, Annie thought. Even tears.

Pregnant. She repeated the word to herself several times, but she could not connect it to Amber and Frederick. Funny, she thought, since it was a word that embodied, literally, the connection between them. Among them, she corrected herself. Among the three of them: Amber, Frederick, and the proto-baby. But try as she would, all she could really imagine and understand, each time she silently uttered the word "pregnant," was the memory, the reality, of her own pregnancies: the humid, overheated, swollen fleshy physicality of it; the weight of her belly pulling down and straining, simultaneously, horizontally, in its taut width; the vast dense fatigue; the fear, the pride, the terror, the joy, the extravagant joy. She had stretched herself out on the couch and read War and Peace both times, a different translation with each pregnancy. Yet she had never read Anna Karenina. Odd. But was it so odd? She had started Anna Karenina numerous times, and with each attempt had been flooded with a startled anxious concern for Anna and her comfort that made her close the book in panic. She didn't want to know what she already knew.