Cathleen Schine: The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"I am a nightmare," Miranda had always said to her latest assistant, smiling innocently.

And it was quite true. Her bullying was both caustic and disarmingly kindhearted. Half the time, she was harsh toward her assistants, demanding order and obedience to compensate for her own natural disorder and rebellious confusion. The other half, she spoiled them like a coddling mother. They never knew if she would snap or stroke. Her assistants trembled, preened, adored and loathed her. They came and then went as quickly as they could extract themselves, but it was she who always made certain they got wonderful new jobs. People called Miranda many things-a horror, a wild woman, and, following her example, a nightmare-but never in all the annals of gossip and slander in her small world had anyone ever doubted her loyalty or, finally, her goodwill. She specialized in melodrama, in her life and in her work, but in both areas, Miranda Weissmann insisted on a happy ending.

For the members of Miranda's family, her unpredictability had become predictable. There were tantrums when she was young; when she was older, a combative dedication to whatever it was to which she was dedicated at the moment, and, at every age, the demands and the drama. But with Miranda's bombast and theatricality, always, came an almost fanatical tenderness. Miranda was manipulative, Josie once whispered to Betty, late at night in bed when he'd been thinking about how lucky he was to have inherited his little family: Miranda was manipulative, but who better to be manipulated by?

Manipulanda, Annie called her.

Now Manipulanda was terrified. Betty and Josie's divorce was shattering, far removed from any conceivable happy ending for anyone involved. Miranda knew her mother needed her now-an unnerving realization for the baby of the family. Worse, she knew that she also needed her mother more than she ever had before.

Sometimes Miranda could not sleep at night, staring in rigid fear at the ceiling as she had as a child after a bad dream.

But she was forty-nine years old. That ought to have made the divorce easier to accept. Or so she was told.

"It's like that old joke, the old Jewish couple in Miami, they go to the rabbi and say we want a divorce, and he says you've been married for seventy-five years, why now? And they say, We were waiting for the children to die." That was what Miranda's current beau, the day trader, had said a week or so before the Oprah debacle.

"I'm not dead," Miranda replied. She'd looked at the day trader with distaste and realized what she had always known but somehow hadn't seen: he was actually a retired professor of economics who now spent his days in front of the computer losing money in the stock market. "I'm not dead," she repeated. And why, really, should the long marriage and her age make it any easier to accept this divorce? Surely that made it worse. She was going to be fifty, a traumatic moment for any woman. Joseph and her mother had been together for as long as she could remember. Another way of saying forever. And Joseph was her father, she had always considered him her father-the only father she had ever known.

Sometimes she cried at night. She wanted to be near her mother: to comfort and to be comforted.

That night, the night the day trader told her the joke, she tossed and turned, unable to sleep. When she finally drifted off, the day trader poked her and asked her to stop snoring. She didn't like his unsympathetic tone of voice and snapped, "Why don't you stop being a fucking asshole?" The next morning, he left in a huff, never to return, and Miranda cried and flung herself around her loft for the rest of the day, then took two Ativan and went back to bed.

She began to refer to herself as the product of a broken home.

"Don't be ridiculous," Annie said. "Your expiration date has expired, Miranda."

Separation is a positive thing, Felicity explained to Joseph. He heard her, but pretended not to. He waved the waiter over. He was tired of getting divorced. If everyone would just get down to business and do what was right, it would all be taken care of. When he thought of Betty, he thought of her in the apartment. That was where she belonged. For him, Betty was suddenly but utterly in the past, but so was the apartment, parts of the same memories, a different life, a life he was leaving behind. So, yes, separation was a positive thing. Yes, yes. But now it appeared he would not only have to separate from Betty, he would also have to separate Betty from her apartment.

"How are the stepdaughters doing?" Felicity asked when they'd ordered.

Joseph never called them his stepdaughters. They were his daughters. He must have shown his distaste for the word. Felicity's wide eyes opened just a bit wider. Her lips parted. She said quickly, "I haven't seen them around the office. I miss them."

"So do I."

"Poor Miranda. What a scandal."

"Double whammy."

"It's no wonder she doesn't come around. The poor woman is probably afraid to leave the house."

For a moment, Joseph did not connect the word "woman" with Miranda. She was a girl, always had been, always would be. If she were a woman, what did that make him?

"Time flies," he said, pouring himself another glass of wine. "I used to read them their bedtime stories. Now they're women with scandals."

"Well, not Annie. Nothing scandalous about that one."

Felicity was right about Miranda being afraid to leave her apartment. She had always spent as little time as possible in her loft, an overpriced, underfurnished rental, always at her office or out to dinner or just out. Now she ordered her meals from every Tribeca restaurant that delivered, answered the door in her nightgown, paid with a credit card, and shuffled back to bed. Her slippers slapped disconsolately against the highly polished wood floors. The world droned on, uninterested and uninspiring, beyond her tall windows. She did not hear the car horns or the shouts of the drivers stuck behind double-parked delivery vans. She did not hear the helicopters. She did not have the energy. She heard only what followed her closely-her slippers and the murmur of the television, the creak of the platform as she settled back into bed, the sickly clatter of the plastic tops hitting the floor as she opened her containers of gummy food, her strong, unhappy heartbeat.

Felicity was right about another thing: it had been a bad year for the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, a terrible year, a year of queenly annus horribilis proportions. The Scandal of the Scandals, the blogs called it. All involving Miranda's highest-profile clients. First, Rudy Lake, whose best-selling, wrenching prison memoir had won him a parole for the murder of his first wife, turned out to have plagiarized the better part of his book from an obscure Hungarian novel of the 1950s; then the elusive Bongo Ffrancis had turned out to be a middle-aged Midwestern housewife, not the seventeen-year-old Welsh heroin addict his memoir had described; and finally, the Midwestern housewife Sarah-Gail Laney, who wrote about her painful search for normality after being raised by sexually abusive missionaries who poisoned each other in Uganda, had actually been raised in Hoboken, where her parents, sharing in the profits of her book, still lived in the quiet two-bedroom apartment in which she'd grown up.

Miranda had greeted these developments with her typical high-volume, inefficient ferocity, berating the press and the world in general; and simultaneously with a quick, irritable tenderness for her clients. When the scandals first broke, six months ago, she had busied herself arranging lawyers and interviews and excuses. She had been indefatigable. Now the publishers were after their advances, her other writers had fled, and the lawyers, interviews, and excuses were as much for herself as for the fraudulent memoirists.