Commonwealth (34 page)

“Your poor mother. I have to feel sorry for your mother, too.”

Franny sighed. “I know.”

“You have to go to the party,” he said. “I'm not brave enough to go back down there with you, but you have to go.”

“I know,” she said.

“Ask the boys to bring me up a plate, will you?”

Franny closed her eyes and nodded against his chest.

If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.

“What about school?” Franny would ask.

“Aren't we capable of home-schooling for six weeks out of the year? It wouldn't even be a full six weeks. We would subtract the weekends and vacation days.”

“What about work?”

Kumar would look at her sharply then, his dark eyebrows pushing down. “Just participate in the fantasy,” he said.

Kumar's first wife, Sapna, had died on Pearl Harbor Day in the full tilt of the holiday season, four days after Amit was born. It was easy enough to remember how long ago that was as Amit was twelve. Sapna had been ten years younger than Kumar.

“Ten years kinder,” he would say to her on her birthday. “Ten years more forgiving.” It was true, Sapna's joy in life could make
her seem uncomplicated, when in fact she was probably as complicated as anyone else. “No stupidity in happiness,” she liked to say. She loved her husband, she loved her sons. She loved that she had managed to escape northern Michigan for Chicago. Their lives, however busy and freezing cold, were good lives. She had come through childbirth for a second time without a hitch. They were all home together. Ravi, who was two and a half, was taking a nap. Sapna was sitting on the couch, the baby in her arms. She looked right at Kumar and said, “It's the strangest thing.” Then she closed her eyes.

The autopsy showed a genetic abnormality of the heart—long QT. Considering the severity of her condition, the real surprise was that she hadn't died after Ravi was born. But sometimes people didn't. Sometimes they lived their entire lives never knowing the fate they missed. When tested, they found out Sapna's mother had the gene as well. Her sister had it.

“For the vast majority of the people on this planet,” Fix had said, “the thing that's going to kill them is already on the inside.”

It was less than a year after the death of his wife that Franny came to Kumar's table at the Palmer House and asked him what he wanted to drink.

“Jesus,” he said, staring up at her in disbelief. “Tell me that you're not still working here.”

Kumar, she thought. How had she forgotten Kumar? “Every now and then, only on the weekends,” Franny said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “I have a real job in the law library back at the University of Chicago but the pay is appalling. Plus I like it here.”

Kumar was waiting to pick up a client and take him to dinner. “I'm offering you a job,” he said. “You can start Monday. A single job that will pay you more than your two jobs combined.”

Franny laughed. Kumar hadn't changed. “Doing what?”

“Due diligence.” He was making it up. “I need you to compile financial records for a merger.”

“I never finished law school.”

“I know how far you got in law school. We need someone we can count on. This is your interview. There, I've hired you.”

A tall black man in a charcoal suit came to the table and Kumar stood to greet him. “Our new associate,” Kumar said to the man, holding out his hand towards Franny. “Franny Keating. Is it still Keating?”

“Franny Keating,” she said, and shook the man's hand.

Later, Kumar would say he worked it out on the spot: he would marry Franny, and in doing so solve everything except the unsolvable. He had loved her when they were young—if not in the year she had shared his apartment then at least after she had left with Leo Posen. If she were free he saw no reason he wouldn't be able to love her again. The problem was time. Sapna's parents had come from Michigan to take care of Ravi when Amit was born and almost a year later they were still living in his house. Between work and his children, between his life and the enormous burden of grief, there wasn't a minute in any day that wasn't devoured. His genius would be to hire Franny rather than date her. He didn't want to date her anyway. He wanted to marry her. If she came to work in his law firm they would see each other every day. They would come upon each other's stories naturally, in the elevator or exchanging files. He could make sure that his idea was as good as he thought it was before entrusting her with his children and his life.

Settled, he thought when he handed her his business card and said goodnight, everything's settled.

The bar was still playing the same tape all these years later, or a tape that was remarkably similar to that other tape. Franny would have laughed to think how much it used to bother her. She never
heard it anymore. But when Kumar and his client left the bar and she put his business card into her apron pocket, she could half-hear Ella Fitzgerald singing as if in the back of her mind,

There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget

Don't you want to forget someone too?

Lying in the darkness of her mother's house, Franny tried to imagine a world in which Sapna had lived. Maybe Franny and Kumar would have met again, bumped into each other in a bookstore one day, laughed and said hello and gone on, but she never would have married him, and his sons would never have been her sons. If Sapna could have lived then certainly Beverly could have stayed married to Fix, which would mean no Jack Dine, no Dine stepbrothers, no Christmas party in Virginia. It would also mean no Marjorie though, and that would be a terrible loss when Marjorie had given Fix the benefit of great love. But maybe Bert would have stayed with Teresa then, and fifty years later he might have saved her life by insisting she go to the doctor in time. Cal would have missed the bee that was waiting for him in the tall grass near the barn at Bert's parents' house. He could have lived for years, though who's to say another bee wouldn't have found him somewhere else? With Cal alive, Albie would never have set the fire that brought him to Virginia, though he wouldn't have come to Virginia anyway because Bert would have stayed in California. Franny, half asleep on top of the bedspread beside her husband, was unable to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the moorings of the past. Without Bert, Franny would never have gone to law school. She would have gotten a masters in English and so she never would have met Kumar at all. She never would have been in Chicago working at the Palmer House and so
she never would have met Leo Posen, who sat at the bar so many lifetimes ago and talked about her shoes. That was the place where Franny's life began, leaning over to light his cigarette. Somehow, out of all that could have been gained or lost, the thought of having never met Leo was the one thing she couldn't bear.

The sound of Kumar's breathing had deepened and slowed, and she got up carefully, felt for her dress and shoes in her suitcase, and changed clothes in the dark.

When she came down the back stairs to the kitchen, Franny found her mother at the breakfast table by herself, arranging petits fours on a tray.

“You know there are people here who will do that for you,” Franny said.

Her mother looked up and gave her an exhausted smile. “I'm hiding for just a minute.”

Franny nodded and sat down beside her.

“This party always seems like such a good idea in the abstract,” Beverly said. “But every time I have it I can't imagine why.”

They could hear the guests in the other room, the hilarity in their voices raised by the eggnog and champagne. The piano player was playing something faster now, maybe a jazzed-up version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but Franny wasn't sure. Twelve days, she thought, she would have killed herself before she ever got to the five golden rings.

Beverly put out the last of the tiny square cakes from the box, pink and yellow and white, each one crowned with a sugared rosette. “Rick came after all,” she said, turning the squares to diamonds. “Now he's drinking.”

“Matthew said he'd come.”

“I can't take them all together,” Beverly said. “One on one the boys are fine, or mostly fine, but when they're together they always
have an agenda. They have so many ideas about the future: what I'm supposed to do with Jack, what I'm supposed to do with the house. They don't seem to have any sense of what conversation is appropriate for a Christmas party. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I don't know why they keep asking me. Do you have any ideas about the future?”

Franny picked up a pale-yellow petit four, the color of a newly hatched chick, and ate it in a single bite. It wasn't very good, but it was so pretty that it didn't matter. “None,” she said. “Zero.”

Beverly looked at her daughter and the look on her face was a pure expression of love. “I wanted two girls,” she said. “You and your sister. I wanted exactly what I had. Other people's children are too hard.”

If her mother hadn't been so pretty none of it would have happened, but being pretty was nothing to blame her for. “I'm going out there,” Franny said, and got up.

Her mother looked down at the plate of tiny cakes. “I'm going to divide them by color,” she said, pushing them all onto the table with the side of her hand. “I think I'd like them better that way.”

Franny found Ravi and Amit in the basement watching
The Matrix
on a television set the size of a single mattress.

“That's rated R,” she said.

The boys looked at her. “For the violence,” Ravi said. “Not sex.”

“And it's Christmas,” Amit said, operating on the logic of wishes.

Franny stood behind them and watched as the black-coated men dipped backwards to avoid being split in half by bullets and then popped up again. If it was going to give them nightmares the damage was already done.

“Mama, have you seen it before?” Amit asked.

Franny shook her head. “It's too scary for me.”

“I'll sleep in your room with you,” her younger boy said, “if you're scared.”

“If you make us stop now,” Ravi said, “we'll never know what happens.”

Franny watched for another minute. She was probably right, it probably was too scary for her. “Your father fell asleep,” she said. “Wait a little while and then go take him a plate for dinner, okay?”

Pleased by their small victory, they nodded their heads.

“And don't tell him about the movie.”

Franny went back upstairs and did one full loop around the room but there were so few people she remembered. She hadn't lived in Arlington since she'd left for college. The wives of Jack Dine's three sons all wanted to talk to her but none of them particularly wanted to talk to one another. The wife of the son she liked the most was the wife she like the least, and the wife of the son she liked the least was the wife she greatly preferred. What was interesting though, not that any of it was interesting at all, was that the wife of the son she had the hardest time remembering was also the wife she had the hardest time remembering.

At some point in the evening before even a single guest had departed, Franny found herself back in the foyer, and there, without looking for it, she saw her own handbag on the floor, slightly behind the umbrella stand. She must have dropped it there when she came in, putting the luggage down, and without a thought she picked it up and went out the door.

The dress she'd brought for the party, the party she'd thought was still two days away, was not red. It was a dark blue velvet with long sleeves but still it was no match for the cold, as her shoes were no match for the snow. It didn't make any difference. She had left the party, slipped away after everyone had seen her. “Where's Franny?” they would say, and the answer would be, “I think she's in the kitchen. I just saw her in the other room.”

The cars were all covered in snow, and hers was a rental, rented
in the dark no less. She didn't know what color it was because she'd never actually seen it. It was an SUV, she remembered that, but all the cars were SUVs, as if SUVs, like vests for men, had been a requirement of the invitation. She went down the hill at the end of the drive and when she was in what she thought might have been the general vicinity, she hit the automatic key. A horn beeped just to the left of her and the lights came on. She brushed off the windows with her wrist and got inside. Once she got the heater running she called Bert.

“I thought I'd come by and say hello if it isn't too late.” She worked to keep her voice casual because she felt frantic.

Bert was always up late. She had to discourage him from calling the house after ten o'clock at night. “Wonderful!” he said, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this call. “Just be careful in the snow.”

Bert still lived in the last house he and Beverly had lived in together, the same house she and Caroline had lived in during high school, the house that Albie had come to for a year after Caroline was gone. It wasn't that far from where Beverly lived with Jack Dine, maybe five miles, but in Arlington it was possible to live five miles from someone and never see them again.

He was waiting for her on the front porch when she pulled up, the front door of the house open behind him. He had put on his coat to come outside. Bert was as old as the rest of them but age arrived at different rates of speed, in different ways. Coming up the walk in the dark, the porch light bright above his head, Franny thought that Bert Cousins still looked like himself.