Still Life with Bread Crumbs (22 page)

“Tad, that was marvelous. Really marvelous. I can’t thank you enough. My father would have appreciated it. I would not have guessed that you knew Kaddish.”

“I have studied sacred music on a freelance basis,” Tad said.

“You can really sing,” Ben repeated.

Tad bowed from the waist. Sarah grabbed Rebecca’s hands in hers and began to talk in a half whisper. “Really, we thought we would have plenty of time but there was an accident on the freeway, and then it turned out someone doesn’t know New York as well as he says he does.”

“Our directions were not good,” said Tad.

“I’m surprised to see both of you,” Rebecca said. “I’m very touched. Extremely touched. You didn’t have to come all this way.”

“What do you mean? Of course we came. Tad saw it somewhere online and I said, we have to go to the wake, and then he had to explain to me, which was really confusing, I have to admit—you’re Jewish?”

“Nominally.”

“It’s just—Winter? Is that a Jewish name?”

“Winter is the sort of Jewish name a certain kind of family named Weiner adopts.”

“Deft, Mom,” muttered Ben.

“And your last name is Simon?” Sarah asked Ben. “Is that Jewish, too?”

And suddenly it was all too much for Rebecca, and she began to laugh, a barking laugh that made the men from the funeral chapel turn in surprise. She put a hand to her mouth.

“There’s a thin line between grief and losing it,” Sarah whispered to Ben. She put a hand on Rebecca’s and took her aside. “I’m sure Jim would have come with us if he’d known,” she said. “But I just couldn’t stand to tell him. I knew you’d understand. The poor guy’s been through so much and, I thought, if I tell him about Rebecca’s dad it will just bring it all back and he just doesn’t need that right now, sad as he is. I mean, you can tell, he’s hurting with everything that happened. He’s a strong guy, he’ll pull out of it, right? But it’s gonna take time, and I thought, I just won’t say anything and he can give you condolences in his own way, at home. Right?”

It was as though Rebecca were at one of those terrible Manhattan cocktail parties, at which people pretended to understand conversations about events they weren’t aware of and people they didn’t know. She knew that she should nod, but instead she said what no one ever said at those parties: “Sarah, I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.”

“About his sister, Polly. You know.”

“I don’t.”

“About his sister dying, how hard that’s been for him, how it’s weighed on him.”

“She died? His sister, Polly? She died?”

“You didn’t know? I thought we talked about it that day I came out to your house. We did, didn’t we? I mean, I thought you were upset about it, the way you were acting, so we didn’t really get into it, if you know what I mean. You really didn’t know? Tad, Rebecca didn’t know about Polly Bates!”

“Very tragic,” Tad said.

“How did she die?”

“No one knows precisely,” Tad said. “She’d been quite ill for some time.”

“She died?” said Rebecca. “Oh, no, I had no idea. When did she die?”

“Right after that big storm,” Sarah said. “Actually, I think he found her the day after that big storm. People thought maybe that’s why there was no service, you know, too hard to get around and all that. Or maybe the ground was too hard, you know? I hate to think about stuff like that, but maybe that was it.”

“Oh, no,” said Rebecca.

“You okay, Mom?” Ben said.

“It’s just broken his heart,” Sarah said.

“Oh, no,” said Rebecca, as Ben put his arm around her, and as they walked away one of the men at the grave site nodded and they began to finish filling in Oscar Winter’s grave.

After they left the cemetery Tad took Sarah to lunch at an Italian restaurant on East Twenty-First Street at which all the waiters sang opera as they waited on tables. Tad had been taken there for dinner the night before the Rothrock competition by the assistant choral director and his wife, and he had never forgotten it. It was a very old restaurant, with very old flourishes, the kinds of flourishes that had long ago gone out of fashion: tapers that dripped colored wax down Chianti bottles, Venetian scenes in enormous rococo gold frames on the walls (although the food was Neopolitan). Tad had the same thing he had had when he was thirteen, veal saltimbocca. The first taste of the food reminded him of the last completely happy night of his life.

“My heart belongs to New York City,” he said.

“I don’t get it, myself,” Sarah said. “I just always feel like
there’s way too much going on, you know, and for someone in my line of work it would be impossible, there’s a coffee shop on every corner. Plus, have you ever noticed, every single woman is skinny. Every single one. But you could live here if you wanted. I bet you could do three or four birthday parties every weekend.”

“I can’t say that it hasn’t occurred to me,” Tad said. “Meeting Ms. Winter has been an inspiration. She is a true artist.”

“Well, what about you? You say you don’t sing anymore and then you open up your mouth today and, oh my gosh, it’s so freaking beautiful, excuse my French, but it is. I couldn’t understand a word, you and Ben—Ben, right? That’s his name?—I couldn’t understand a word either of you were saying but it was so so sad. And the way you sing—wow. Just wow. Really.”

Tad lowered his eyes. He was fond of Sarah, but he did not necessarily think she was a good judge of music. On the other hand he had been very touched by Rebecca’s words. He had a sense that she was not a woman given to overpraise.

(At lunch with Ben, in a so-called Asian-French fusion restaurant that was, coincidentally, only a few blocks from where Tad and Sarah sat, Rebecca told him the story of Tad’s downfall at the competition. “He’s no boy soprano anymore, but the guy’s a good tenor,” Ben said.

“I was so touched that you said Kaddish,” Rebecca said.

“Yeah, let’s not share that moment with Dad, okay?”

“Understood.”

“You okay?” Ben said.

“I really need a glass of wine.”

“Because of what Sarah told you about that guy and his sister? That’s the guy you work with, right?”

Rebecca nodded. “I feel terrible. I should have known.”

“We’re New Yorkers. We mind our own business.”

“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” Rebecca said.)

“I’m beyond shocked that Rebecca didn’t know about Polly Bates,” Sarah said. “I thought they were such good friends. Not
she and Polly, I don’t know that anyone was friends with her, she never even came in the shop, I wouldn’t know her if I fell over her. Well, you know what I mean, I wouldn’t have known her if I’d fallen over her. I meant Jim. You’d think Jim would have told Rebecca. I told you, right, that I sold all of those pictures of the dog she did. All at once, too. She gave me a whole new set and maybe I’ll sell those, too.”

Their waiter put down two espressos and then began to sing
“La donna è mobile.”
Tad hummed under his breath. “I know this one,” Sarah said.

As they left Tad picked up the restaurant’s card and put it in his jacket pocket.

Rebecca took out her gold fountain pen and opened a box of pale blue paper she had gotten at the Walmart.

The dog lay beneath the table sighing conspicuously. He had not liked spending two days in the shed while Rebecca was in New York. It was cold, and not what he had become used to.

Cold. Formal. She tossed the paper into the basket beneath the table. The dog removed it and began to shred it happily with his teeth.

Unexpected? She had been told that his sister was sick. Perhaps she had lingered for months, likely to die at any moment, not to mention at the moment that her only brother was with Rebecca.

She took another sheet.

No.

No.

In the end she wrote only:

Before she could find something wrong with what she had written she folded the note in half and slipped it into an envelope. “Jim Bates,” she wrote in her strong slanting handwriting, the black ink harsh against the sky blue, and then she stopped.

She didn’t know his address. She didn’t know his address. She could conjure the small house with the yellow kitchen, the flowered paper. But she didn’t know the street name, the house number.

And so the note sat there on the table, beneath the rounded rock, as each day she determined to get the address, from Sarah, from Tad, from someone in town. There it sat, waiting.

“Paige Whittington,” Ben said.

“That can’t honestly be her name,” Rebecca said.

“Don’t be a reverse snob,” said Ben. “She’s the best. I called Maddie, and that’s what she said. ‘She’s the best.’ ”

“She’s the best,” said Ben’s grade school friend Maddie, who was an assistant to a very prolific painter who was prolific because his assistants did much of his actual painting from what he called templates. “She has a penchant for black-and-white, but she has a few people who work in color. She represents that guy, you know the one, who does the subway cars?”

“I like his stuff.”

“Me, too. And she reps that woman who did the egg series. She ripped off your mom, a bit, with those, but she’s good, too. Who needs an agent?”

“Just someone I know.”

“Ben? Benjie S.?” There had been three Benjamins in their preschool class, and ever after Benjamin had been Benjie S., not to be confused with Benjie C. or Benjie M. In fact three times there had been a Benjie reunion: the assistant PR rep for the New York Yankees, the baby banker, and the second unit camera guy on some film none of the other two had ever heard of or would ever watch.

Silence on both ends of the line. Breathing. A sound that might be Maddie opening a bottle of water.

Then a scream.

“Ben Symington, if you are scouting an agent for Rebecca Winter, Rebecca goddamn Winter, if you are sending your mother to Paige Whittington on my say-so, which, you had better believe it, will make Paige Whittington’s career, I want some credit. I want my fingerprints all over this. I want Paige Whittington to know my name and put me on gallery opening lists and send me flowers.”

“I always figured you were already on gallery opening lists,” Ben said. “Paige Whittington,” he’d written down on a sheet of paper in strong block print. Ben had once wanted to be a comic book artist. “Graffiti artist, tattoo artist, comic book artist,” his father had said. “How the word has been devalued.”

“You’re evading,” Maddie said.

“I think you mean evasive.”

“And again. Which means you don’t want to tell me. Wait, doesn’t TG represent your mother?”

“She did,” said Ben.

Another scream. “I want to be part of this conversation,” Maddie yelped before she hung up.

“Paige Whittington reps the woman who did that egg series,” Ben told Rebecca.

“Those are wonderful photographs,” Rebecca said. “I went to the opening.”

“A bit of a Rebecca Winter rip-off.”

“Oh, please. There’s nothing new under the sun. Do you have a number for Miss Whittington? I’m afraid I will never be able to think of her without thinking of Dick Whittington and his cat.”

“Mention Maddie, can you? She’s the one who came up with her name.”

“How is Maddie? Still applying paint for that old fraud?”

“She sends you her love.”

“I’ve always liked Maddie.”

“Don’t start, Mom.”

“Maddie Becker recommended you,” said Rebecca.

“I should send her flowers,” said Paige Whittington.

She was a tiny woman who looked as though she was preparing to play Peter Pan in summer stock. Her hair was perhaps an inch long all over, a variegated blond. Her features were small and regular, and she wore leggings and a smocklike shirt in a batik print.

“Toad-in-the-hole? They honestly serve toad-in-the-hole?” she said at Tea for Two, looking at the back of the menu.

“If you order it you will have made a friend for life,” Rebecca said quietly, and sure enough Sarah squealed and said, “Oh, New York, right?”

“And my mother happens to be English,” Paige said.

“You lucky duck!”

“What’s the difference between toad-in-the-hole and sausage pie with gravy?”

Sarah sat down and crossed her floury forearms on the table. “Same thing,” she said.

“Got it,” said Paige.

Just as Rebecca had realized after Peter was gone that she was living with a mother lode of channeled disapproval in her mind, so Paige Whittington had showed her in less time than it took Sarah to prepare their lunch that she had for many years been in an abusive agent relationship. This feeling had begun when she first called Paige Whittington and offered to drive to Manhattan to meet with her. “Oh, I’ll come to you,” the younger woman had said, and she had, with a packet describing her other clients and what she would do for Rebecca if she represented her. Her other clients were not as well-known as Rebecca, but their photographs were very fine. And how nice it was, to talk to someone who was enthusiastic and pleasant and spoke in full sentences and had an actual name instead of initials.

(TG had spent a week considering whether to insist that she had an agreement with Rebecca and that their relationship was legally binding. Then she had done an income run on Rebecca for the last three years, and made a snorting noise. “So over,” she said, and went out to a party on a hotel roof for a London artist whose work made extensive sculptural use of firearms and grenades.)

“This is excellent toad-in-the-hole,” Paige said to Sarah.

“Well, all I can say is, you made my day, my week, maybe my month. It’s hard, selling English cuisine in a place like this if it’s not a scone, and even my scones are Americanized, to be honest, and Rebecca—I still can’t believe I call her Rebecca, did you see the poster on the wall, it’s signed, excuse me very much—what was I saying? Oh, Rebecca says they’re good scones, but I had to adapt and adapt. That’s why toad-in-the-hole is under two names, the real name and the one I can sell it with.”