A Permanent Member of the Family (6 page)

Except for Jane, there were no representatives from the High Peaks Country Day School or the town of Keene. Which made sense, Jane said to Isabel when she groused about the absence of mourners from the north. It was an expensive full day's travel each way, and most people up there no doubt assumed that there would be a memorial service in Keene in June or July, after school let out and the summer people who knew George personally had come back from their winter homes and Isabel had returned from her own sojourn here in Miami Beach.

“Yeah, right,” Isabel said. “
If
I return to Keene for the summer. And if I decide to hold a memorial service.”

 

A
T THE RECEPTION
back
at the condominium, Isabel set the urn with George's ashes on top of the sideboard in the dining area, then stood next to the urn as if to lend George's authority to her words and announced in public for the first time that she had decided to stay on alone in the condo in Miami Beach for the rest of the winter. “I'll have George's ashes to keep me company,” she said. “But only until I take them back to Keene and scatter them from the top of Mount Marcy, which is what he always said he wanted. By then I should be able to live without him beside me any longer.”

She added that she planned to use George's life insurance money to buy the condo they'd been renting and from now on she'd winter over here permanently. She was so uncharacteristically firm that no one in George's extended family tried to dissuade her.

After the other mourners had departed, George's family members, who were staying at the Lido on Belle Isle, took the opportunity to go out for Chinese food. They wanted to discuss among themselves George's money, most of which, since he and Isabel were childless, would soon belong to Isabel. George and Isabel had worked as underpaid teachers their entire married lives and between them had built up a million-dollar TIAA-CREF retirement account. But George, his two brothers and his sister were descended from early-twentieth-century owners of mountains of Minnesota iron ore plus several subsidiary steel-dependent industries in Pittsburgh, and George's portion of the family estate was many times the size of his half of their TIAA-CREF account. From the start George had micromanaged both his and Isabel's modest personal finances, so there was reason for the family to fear that their sister-in-law, who as far as they knew had never paid a bill on her own or written a check for more than the weekly groceries, would not be a responsible custodian of her new wealth.

George had taught math and geometry, but Isabel had taught literature and art history, and the family viewed her as mildly eccentric, possibly artistic. Isabel's background did not reassure them, either. Her parents had owned and operated a small motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A bright only child, she had been a scholarship student at Smith when she met George, who had just taken a teaching position at nearby Deerfield Academy. They hoped that George had had the foresight to establish a trust naming one or all three of his siblings as trustees, a trust that would provide Isabel with a monthly income sufficient to cover her ongoing expenses, while preserving the rest of George's estate for future generations of Pelhams. They wished they had discussed this eventuality with him years ago. But when it came to money, George, like his siblings, was as closemouthed as he was tightfisted, and no one had been willing to broach the subject with him.

 

I
SABEL AND
J
ANE,
like
teenagers, ate standing in front of the open refrigerator, picking with chopsticks from cartons of leftover take-out curried chicken salad and couscous. Afterward, Isabel opened a chilled New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and she and Jane went out onto the balcony, carrying their wineglasses and the bottle. They sat and drank and watched the evening sun slide across the darkening sky. The coin-sized buttery yellow disc, when it slipped behind the skyscrapers and glass and steel office towers on the far side of Biscayne Bay, swiftly turned into a large scarlet fireball.

Isabel said, “Look at how when the sun gets halfway below the horizon you can literally see it move. It's like the way the sand in an hourglass pours faster and faster as it nears the end. I should know why that happens, but I don't. George would've known why. Something to do with optics and geometry, probably.”

“Something to do with time,” Jane said and refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between them. “So, what will you do now?”

“Interesting how we use ‘so' to signal a change of subject. Anyhow, what'll I do now that George's gone?”

“Yes. In your rapidly encroaching old age.”

“I'm old, Janey, but not elderly. Not yet, anyhow. George liked to solve problems before they happen. I like to solve them after they happen.”

“And now you can do that? Solve your problems after they happen?”

“Right.”

“I suppose it's like when Frank needs some R and R he takes his gun or his fishing rods, depending on the season, and heads for camp with his male hunting and fishing buddies, and they tell lies and drink and let their beards grow and don't bathe. When I need R and R, I go down to the monastery in Woodstock and sit zazen for a long weekend.”

“No, it's not like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don't have to choose between them. The huntin' and fishin' boys' camp in the woods versus the monastery with the Buddhists. I had to choose. The Linger Longer Retirement Home for Old People in Saratoga with George versus a condo in Miami Beach with no one. One or the other. Not much of a choice.”

“And now you don't have to choose.”

“No, now I
can
choose. And I'm choosing a condo in Miami Beach with no one.”

“Well, I just meant that Frank and I are different. The way you and George are . . . were different.”

“Right. So, Janey, to change the subject, can you stay on for a few days after everyone leaves?” Isabel asked. “I'm going to need help moving George's things into storage, his clothes and personal stuff, things I don't need or want. I'd just as soon keep his family out of it for now. I'd like to sort it out without them hovering over my shoulder. They're not exactly vultures, but they keep mental and computerized inventories of just about everything. Like George did.”

Jane said, “I remember how very neat and orderly he was. But I always admired him for that. Not like Frank.”

“Right, he was not like Frank. More like you,” she said and laughed.

“In some ways, maybe. Are you okay, Isabel? You seem . . . I don't know, like you're holding back your grief. Your loss.”

“You mean, am I in what you shrinks call denial? Probably. Down the road I'm sure I'll feel crushed by his absence. I was so used to his presence. But right now the truth is I feel liberated by it. And only a little guilty,” she said. “And he didn't suffer. We should all be as lucky.”

 

I
SABEL WENT TO BED EARLY
—to avoid the company of George's siblings and their spouses and mostly grown children and grandchildren, Jane figured. Despite an arduous and stressful day, Isabel hadn't seemed in the slightest tired. The opposite, in fact.

Instead of heading back to the Lido, where they had booked a string of rooms, the family lingered another half hour at the condo with Jane. It was a very chic hotel, they kept repeating, as if slightly confused and threatened by its stylishness and worried about the cost. They would have preferred to stay over on the mainland in a Marriott or Holiday Inn, but had wanted to take rooms close to their brother's condominium, they said, in case their sister-in-law needed their ongoing comfort and help, which evidently she did not.

When finally they left, Jane washed the glasses and shut out the lights one by one and went into the guest bedroom. She knew that Frank expected her to call tonight, because tomorrow he'd be in camp and out of cell phone range for at least a week. But she did not want to talk with him. She did not want to look at herself and Isabel through her husband's critical eyes. Not tonight, anyhow, when her views of herself and her best friend were so indistinct and shifting. She sat on the bed in the guest room and decided to send him a text. She preferred whenever possible to send texts instead of speaking on the phone—with texts she was more in control of what she said and heard and when she said and heard it. Fewer surprises that way. Jane did not like surprises.

She thumb-typed:
I solve problems before they happen, and u solve them after they happen.
She read the text over three times, then deleted it. She began again and this time wrote:
When I need R & R I go 2 the monastery. When u need R & R u go 2 your man-cave.
She half laughed to herself and deleted this text, too.

She stood and walked to the window and looked out. A half moon hung in the southwest quadrant of the sky. The lights of the city glistened on the rippled black surface of the bay, and the headlights of cars on the arched causeway steadily crossing from the mainland to Miami Beach looked like gold beads sliding down a string. She could understand how the prospect of living out her sixties and then her seventies and maybe even her eighties alone in Miami Beach had excited Isabel. It was a new world, a semitropical, Latin American city where everything worked because it was not in Latin America. A wholly new life awaited her here. After almost forty years of marriage, Isabel, like any woman, had made so many small compromises and concessions to align her view of what was desirable and necessary with her husband's view that she probably didn't know any longer what was desirable and necessary to herself alone. Jane understood how, suddenly cut loose from George's cautious, reticent nature, Isabel might find the idea of living here six months a year exciting, enticing, liberating. Becoming a snowbird was the really big thing, the thing that George himself would never have embraced. He might have been willing to try it out, but only to demonstrate what a bad idea it was.

In many ways it was a young person's city—especially over here in Miami Beach, a chain of barrier islands made glamorous by movies and television, made famous by drugs and violence and illicit wealth and stylish by fashion shoots and art deco architecture. It seemed that every smart, ambitious person under thirty who couldn't get to New York City or Los Angeles came to Miami. And it was also a city where for generations elderly people from the north had come to sit on benches in the park with the sun on their faces, an unread book or newspaper on their laps, while they waited for their breathing to stop. Isabel was not a young person drawn to the glamour, fame and style of Miami Beach, obviously; but neither was she one of those old people waiting to die. Jane stood at the window with her cell phone in her hand and typed:
Isabel in v. rough shape. May need to stay here longer than planned. Call me when back from camp. XX J.
She quickly hit
send
—before she had a chance to hit
delete
.

 

G
EORGE'S FAMILY FLEW BACK
to their homes, jobs and schools in New England and upstate New York, and the following day Isabel and Jane turned to packing George's belongings. With the convertible top down and Jane in the passenger's seat, Isabel drove to the OfficeMax on West Avenue and bought a half-dozen banker's boxes plus several larger cartons, packing tape, labels and Magic Markers. On the way back she stopped off at the Public Storage facility on West and Dade and reserved a five-by-ten-foot climate-controlled storage unit. Then the women went for a long lunch at the outdoor bookstore café on Lincoln Road.

When they had ordered lunch, Isabel lifted her water glass and declared, “I'm really glad, Jane, that you of all people can be here with me in Miami Beach. I'm really glad I can share both the work and the pleasures of setting up my new life with you.” She extended her glass, and Jane clinked it with hers.

Jane said, “Actually, I came mainly to hold your hand and help you cope with George's death. This is a lot more . . . I don't know, fun, I guess. More than it should be. So it's like a guilty pleasure. You don't need much hand-holding, and you seem to be coping surprisingly well. If I lost Frank . . . ,” she said and trailed off. She watched a pair of Rollerbladers, suntanned, hard-bodied men in their twenties, shirtless and hairless in tight shorts and wraparound sunglasses. They darted past the café and swooped like raptors through the shoppers and gawkers strolling along the sidewalk and were gone. “If I lost Frank . . . ,” she began again, “well, for one thing, I'd be unable to hold on to the house. We're second-mortgaged to our eyeballs, first to help the girls finish college, now to help them pay off their college loans. The last few years, with the store failing and Frank out of work a lot, it's been mean. At times we've had to live pretty much on my income alone, which ain't much to shout about, believe me. But I guess it's different for you,” she said.

“Financially, yes. My little pension from High Peaks Country Day and our joint account at Adirondack Bank should more than cover my living expenses until I go back up to Keene and settle the estate. Something I can't say to anyone, except you, Janey, so don't quote me,” she said and lowered her voice, “but knowing that soon I'll be a very wealthy woman has made George's death a lot easier to bear,” she said. “Sounds awful. But it's true.”

“I thought you loved Frank!” Jane said. “I mean George. I thought you loved George.”

Isabel smiled. “Of course I loved him! And I'll miss him terribly. We were married thirty-seven years. And I could concentrate on that, on what I've lost. Maybe I should. Most widows would. Or I could concentrate on what I had, thirty-seven years of companionship, and be thankful. But when you spend your life married to someone and he dies, in a sense you die, too. Unless you choose to be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed. And then it's almost like you get to be an adolescent girl again. And right now, that's how I'm feeling. Like an adolescent girl. Honestly, Janey, I haven't felt this way since I was fifteen!”