Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

Before the scandals came, Miranda had been the agent who could spot the flash of memoir gold in the barren hills of anecdote, who could meet someone on an airplane one day and sign a deal on the book they had never before thought of writing the next. She found talent and excitement everywhere. In the beginning, there had been two beautifully written, deeply moving memoirs-the Rhodesian childhood, the Egyptian one-that won prizes. Miranda had discovered them, had cherished them and shepherded them into their rightful place in the world, had made a great deal of money from them, too.

In the following years, she uncovered originality and authenticity with such regularity that her little agency was dubbed the Memoir Mill on Gawker. Now, suddenly, some of those authentic and original stories Miranda uncovered turned out to be fraudulent and recycled lies.

She had been deceived. She had been lied to. She had been abandoned by the stories she had nurtured with such love and care. When she saw her mother suffering from the divorce, from Josie's deception and treachery, Miranda sometimes had trouble keeping herself from gasping in intimate recognition. There is divorce and there is divorce, she told herself. And for me, there is both.

When Felicity said that Annie did not have scandals, she was right about that, too. Annie was a hardworking, even-tempered person who tried to take life as it presented itself without making a fuss. If Miranda was swept up in the waves of successive Lite Victories, Annie was comfortably dug in to her burrow of books. She read the same ones over and over-the classic novels of nineteenth-century England, the minor novels of twentieth-century England. Annie was matter-of-fact, but the facts were never hers. The light of real life, which to Miranda meant the busy melodrama of everyday scandal, never penetrated this soft, dappled world. Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream. By the book, Miranda always said of Annie, trying to describe what she considered to be the literalism of her sister's imagination. Perhaps it was this quality that made it a surprise to Miranda when she discovered that with this divorce Annie, too, was sad and disoriented and, most of all, angry.

"I miss him," Annie said. "And I hate him. Hate. Hate. Hate. Loathe. And hate."

"Life," Miranda replied, rather triumphantly, "is wracked by tragic contradictions."

This was one of Miranda's core beliefs: Life was wracked by tragic contradictions… that would all come out right in the end. At this moment, however, with regard to Josie's treatment of her mother, she could not bring herself to pronounce the second half of her sentence.

Annie noticed the omission and was about to comment on it when Miranda's cell phone rang. In the past, Miranda would have answered and carried on, with great gusto, a conversation full of personal details from the sordid stories Miranda's authors specialized in. But this time Miranda said, "I guess that will have to do," in a tired voice.

"Business?" Annie said when she hung up.

"What's left of it." Miranda took a deep breath. Failure: it was like having a fatal disease. People pretended it didn't exist, turned away quickly with an embarrassed look of pity, stopped talking when you came up to them unexpectedly. People pretended it didn't exist, and so did she; yet it was always there, the air she breathed.

Annie, apparently sensing some of this, said, "Sorry," looking embarrassed in a way that proved Miranda's point.

"Not your fault."

"Still, sorry."

Miranda took her sister's arm, walked a few steps that way; then, hoping that was enough reassurance for Annie, dropped it.

In the contested apartment, Betty Weissmann took some satisfaction in finishing a bottle of Joseph's favorite single malt. Some satisfaction, though not much, for Betty did not like single malt whiskey.

And where was Joseph now? Off with some woman, no doubt. Some other woman. She had his horrid whiskey that tasted like damp and dirt. This other woman, whoever she was, had him. It was enough to make you cry. Betty did not have the energy to cry. She had already cried far too much. She would tie up her belongings in a handkerchief, hang it from a stick, put the stick over her shoulder like one of the three little pigs, and go on the train to the cottage in Westport to seek her fortune. Her fortune did not include a wolf to blow her house down, for that had already been done. But she knew the fortune of an elderly divorcee; she knew her fortune, and it was dark.

I have an idea.

Annie heard Miranda announce that she had an idea the way she heard the sound of traffic. It was ceaseless, and so it barely existed. Annie heard her sister, and she did not hear. She continued mentally adding up the retirement funds that Joseph had long ago put in her mother's name for tax purposes. Betty could take out enough of a distribution to pay for some of her food and gas. Even the new Josie with his brain tumor-there really could be no other explanation for his ugly behavior-would continue to pay for the AARP supplement to Betty's Medicare. And the car insurance was all paid up for the year. She had checked with Josie's secretary, who, though loyal to her employer, was not unsympathetic to Betty's plight. If Annie and Miranda helped out, Betty might be able to just scrape by.

"Mmmhmm," Annie said to Miranda.

She would pay for the movers with her tax rebate. A shame to dismantle her mother's beautiful apartment. She wondered how much of Betty's furniture would fit in the little house.

"We'll all move to Westport," Miranda said.

The chairs from the living room would probably work. The image of those chairs in a new setting suddenly made her angry.

"That's my idea," Miranda was saying.

Annie said, "Oh, Miranda," as she so often did.

But Miranda had it all worked out by the time they reached their mother's apartment building, and when Betty heard the plan, she was ecstatic.

"I know you're not serious," Annie said.

"It's so practical, dear," Betty said. "You girls sublet your places and make lots of money on them."

Miranda's cell phone was ringing. She looked at it but did not answer. One of the publishers who were suing her. That seemed to be the reason she had no money, or so her lawyer had tried to explain. Everything was tied up until the lawsuits were settled. She was living on credit cards. She had always lived on credit cards, though in the past she had employed a business manager to pay off the credit cards. Now there was no money to pay the business manager to pay off the credit cards. "Lots of money," she said, echoing her mother's words hopefully.

"Mom," Annie was saying, "you just called us girls. We're women in our fifties. You guys are having one of your fantasies."

"I'm forty-nine," Miranda said. "And I'm not a guy."

"It will be like the Great Depression, when everyone lived together," Betty said. "Oh, I can't wait."

Annie knew that voice. It was the picnic voice. "This is not a picnic," she said desperately.

Betty looked at her, stricken. "That's what Josie always says." Her eyes filled with tears.

"A hideous experiment," Annie said to her son Charlie when he called a few days later. "Three grown women grafted onto the memory of a nuclear family. Like Frankenstein's monster. There will be mobs of violent peasants. And torches."

"You don't have to go, you know."

"If you think you and your brother can get out of taking care of me when I'm old by giving me permission to abandon my mother in this her hour of need, you have another think coming."

He laughed. "What about your job?"