Kate Christensen - The Great Man

“I can see that objectively,” said Abigail with a sudden whiskey-fueled clap of rage, “but I have to say that emotionally, that strikes me as purely disingenuous.”

Teddy was silent for a moment. Something worked in her face. Everyone waited for her to answer except Ethan, who rapped his knuckles softly on the table. Teddy said finally, looking fixedly at the air between them all, “When he died, I thought I was going to go insane. I did, maybe. Looking back, now I think I went a little crazy. I sold my beautiful house and moved to an old dump in a sordid neighborhood farther away from everything, and if it hadn’t been for Lila, I might have literally died of a broken heart. Lila sat up with me at night because I couldn’t sleep. My brain was sick with grief. I didn’t talk much, did I?”

“No,” said Lila, “not much at all. You asked about my grandchildren. You wanted me to talk. I always thought you never really grieved properly for Oscar.”

“I didn’t even know he was dead,” said Teddy directly to Abigail. “He died at home, with you. Who would think to tell me? I read his obituary like most of the world. Read about it in the paper…that’s how I learned he was gone.”

“And it didn’t mention you or Ruby or Samantha,” said Lila.

“Well, of course not,” said Teddy. “Abigail and Maxine weren’t going to allow anything about us in Oscar’s obituary. I’m sure if you had any control over the biographies, we’d all be erased from those, too. The reason I can’t apologize is that this was between you and Oscar, Abigail. Not me. Maxine is right, but only half right. If you had tried to put a stop to his affair with me, it would have created an intolerable situation for him. He couldn’t give either one of us up. He needed us both equally. If you had been the histrionic kind of woman to telephone me with your voice trembling dramatically, begging me to give him up for the sake of your marriage, your son, I would have told you it had nothing to do with me, that it was entirely up to Oscar and between the two of you.”

“You have not one fucking idea,” Maxine snarled. “You controlling bitch. You sucked him in and kept him there.”

Ethan made another high keening sound in the back of his throat.

“I had him under some kind of spell?”

“I think you controlled him. You can call it any fancy name you want.”

Teddy laughed harshly. “You think Oscar was that easily led around by the nose?”

“Not the nose,” said Maxine.

Abigail had been looking intently at Teddy throughout this conversation, watching her confident way of speaking, her gracefully precise gestures, imagining that if Teddy had been Oscar’s wife, he very well might not have needed a mistress. This thought both galvanized her and gave her a mournful sense of her own failings. “I was never that kind of woman,” she said. “The kind to call anyone up like that. I had too much pride and what I mistakenly thought was dignity. Now I see I was laughed at and mocked.”

Ethan keened again. He sounded like a wild animal.

“Never,” said Lila.

“All those nights I couldn’t contact him,” Teddy said to Abigail. “The night I went into labor with our daughters, I couldn’t call him. He was at home with you. I knew, I understood, exactly what the deal was. All along I accepted it. But when he died, I saw how much I had given up. And I don’t mean because he left me nothing. I mean because, in the end, a woman needs legitimacy.”

“I know those nights,” said Abigail. “I had them, too. I didn’t have your telephone number, Teddy, did I? And I was laughed at; I was mocked. Maxine, you mocked me.”

“To your face,” said Maxine. “Right to your face. It wasn’t mockery. I just thought you were being a dumb bunny. He lived off your money and gave you nothing in return. Where was your legitimacy, Abigail? A piece of paper that pronounced you Mrs. Feldman? So fucking what. A marriage is in the details.”

“All due respect, but how would you know?” Abigail said in a sudden white-hot explosion of rage at Maxine, the rage that had been rankling her all afternoon — for decades, in fact. “How would you know what marriage is, Maxine?”

Ethan’s hands flapped by his ears. He rocked.

“I know,” said Maxine with blunt indifference to Abigail’s fury, “what Oscar was getting from you for free.”

“You couldn’t stand to see him get exactly what he wanted,” said Abigail. She was out of breath with anger at Maxine, dizzy with it. “And he got it all and no one took it away from him. He had me and Teddy and his little chippies, as Maribelle and I called them. He had his two cakes, ate them whenever he wanted, and all the cupcakes he wanted on the side. Not to mention everything else he had. Because he was bold. He had the courage of his convictions. Shhh. Ethan, it’s all right.”

“That’s for sure,” said Teddy with a little laugh. “Absolute clarity in all things, Oscar. Never wavered, never hesitated.”

“He had balls,” said Abigail.

“He was not a good boy,” added Lila.

Maxine looked around at their three faces. “Please,” she said. “I never got silly about him. I saw him for what he was. Without the haze of sex.”

“Shhh. Ethan,” said Abigail again. “I promise, it’s all right.”

Ethan abruptly went quiet, but his hands moved by his ears and he kept rocking.

“Staking your claim,” said Teddy. “You’re welcome to it.”

“We all saw him, in our own ways,” said Lila.

A silence fell around the table. The four women avoided eye contact, as if suddenly ashamed or shy. Into the breach came the sound of Katerina singing to herself in the far corner of the loft, something in Hungarian in a raspy, slightly off-key voice that somehow managed to be beautiful anyway by virtue of the language she sang in. Her voice sounded to Abigail like a peasant girl’s during wartime as she dug, squatting in a potato patch behind a hut.

Abigail said to no one in particular, “I’ve read too many novels. I haven’t lived enough of life.”

“Oh, me, too,” said Lila, as if she had been thinking along similar lines.

“I wanted to,” said Abigail, “but I could never quite get up my nerve. And then Ethan always needed me.”

“You could have put him in a home,” said Maxine. She looked over at Ethan. His mouth was twisted; he was looking at the tabletop.

“I could do no such thing!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” said Lila.

“Why not?” Teddy asked. “Would he have known the difference?”

Abigail said with horror, “He would have been miserable among strangers!”

“Among his own kind,” said Maxine. “Cared for by trained professionals. And then Oscar might have felt he had your undivided attention, Abigail.”

“Maxine,” said Teddy, “that was not why Oscar—”

“Oh really,” said Maxine.

Teddy and Maxine stared at each other with hatred.

“It wasn’t,” said Abigail. “You’re right, Teddy. He didn’t want my undivided attention. He wanted me distracted.”

“Oscar, Oscar, Oscar,” said Maxine. “Look at us, four smart old bags with plenty to think about, fixated on my putz of a brother, who’s been dead for five years and wasn’t especially nice to any of us.”

“Time for Lila and me to be going,” said Teddy. “You have your tefillin, we’ll all keep our traps shut about Helena, we had a nice little volley of long-overdue spats and tantrums, and now I’m tired and ready for a nap.” She stood up and said to Lila, “Ready?”

“Yes,” said Lila. “But I just want to add one thing. Oscar and Teddy were soul mates. That was true love if I ever saw it. It didn’t diminish or tarnish over all those years. I can’t go home without saying that.”