Becoming the Butlers (24 page)

“What about Mom?” I finally had to ask.

“I’ll grant her the divorce and try not to be a sore loser. We gave her our fighting best, didn’t we, Rachel? Elizabeth should be proud. I’m proud. If she ever gets tired of the baby she can send the kid here and I’ll try to be a better father than I was to you. Rachel Two. Not too many fathers get a second chance.”

“We’ll both try again.”

“That’s the spirit, Melody,” he said, placing his hand over my fist, which clutched that lighter as if it were the most precious gift in the world.

*

James eventually quit A.A. (all those pale trembling people gave him the willies) and limited his drinking to a glass of wine at night, for his health, and a few beers when the Mets beat the Red Sox. My father granted my mother a divorce, and six months later we received a photograph of a baby who my father claims looks like a remarkable combination of Pilar and me. I saw Pilar Vasquez a few weeks ago, in Elmhurst, Queens, a mixed neighborhood of Latin American, Korean, and Irish immigrants. Weekends she works in a dentist’s office; the doctor is so impressed with her that he promised to help out with college tuition. Her mother was promoted to assistant chef at the hotel, and is taking English lessons at night. Mrs. Vasquez fell in love with the hotel’s caterer, a sixty-year-old ex-farmer from Iowa, and hopefully, after their marriage, will receive a green card. “I miss you, Rachel,” Pilar told me. “I even got so used to sleeping with the windows open that Luisa needs an electric blanket. But this is right. I’m glad your dad’s back. And we’re doing fine here too.”

Mrs. Rosen also heard wedding bells. An old man she met in the laundry room proposed to her and she promptly agreed. “Maybe there’s something in the basement that inspires romance,” my father declared. Nicole Rudomov moved to Paris where her parents seemed to be reconciled. All her postcards bear the same message: “Mon Dieu! I have met the love of my life, the Tristan to my Isolde, the Romeo to my Juliet, and his sacred name is…Jean-Louis, Alain, Yves…,” the names changing as rapidly as the months. The Butlers also left New York City, supposedly for Palo Alto, where Mrs. Butler is getting a Masters at Stanford University. I imagine that even Olivia and Edwin might feel intimidated by the throngs of beautiful, rich, suntanned blondes circling the campus on their shiny motorbikes. They needn’t worry about fading reputations in New York. Their legend remains intact at the Winfield Academy, like traces of chalk still visible on an erased blackboard.

So I never did become a Butler, and James finally decided that he would never be a Mexican painter and woo my mother back. We never became who we hoped to be, but instead became better versions of ourselves. We were alone again
in our drafty apartment, where the pipes clanked and the wind from the Hudson River howled through the shallow window panes and the one bulb in the kitchen flickered like a fading star. But that was fine, and when my father would look up from the exam he was correcting, or his newspaper at breakfast, and smile, I knew that was all the light I needed.