The Unwitting (21 page)

The crowd moved on to “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Beside me, the ghost of Charlie laid down a jazzy beat while his fingers played the drums in the small of my back. At “We Three Kings” he turned operatic. For a dizzy moment there in the dark, he was with me again. Then he was gone. These days that was always happening.

Sonia turned up. She put her arm around Abby’s shoulders, and together they belted out “Jingle Bells.” I had never been so grateful to her.

The ceremony was winding down. I knew what was coming. I started to make an excuse to Elliot about being cold, but before I could finish, he told me that he and Sonia would take care of Abby and the housekeeper would let me in.

The doorman, who knew me, wished me a Merry Christmas. The elevator man did the same. The first note of a bugle sounded as the door slid closed. I was in luck. The sound did not penetrate the elevator shaft of a prewar Park Avenue building. I would not have to listen to taps, those mournful notes that can twist even a whole heart.

As the housekeeper opened the door for me, the last note sounded and a hush fell over the crowd. I crossed the living room to the windows facing the church and saw the minister raise his arms. “Let there be light” boomed through the loudspeaker out into the night, and a river of radiance poured down the islands in the middle of Park Avenue for two and a half miles, all the way to the brand-new eyesore that was the Pan Am Building.

“Corny,” Charlie used to whisper each year, but standing in the half circle of his arm, I could feel the shiver go down his spine.

I turned my back on the street. A few minutes later, the other guests began drifting in.

For the next hour, I tried to make myself invisible, shrinking into corners, hovering on the outskirts of groups, nodding my head in inane agreement with anything that was said. After I made sure that Abby was settled with a dinner plate and two girls about her age on the floor in front of the fireplace, I skirted the buffet table and went roaming the apartment in search of a hiding place. The living room was full. In the study, a group of people sat around the coffee table with plates of food and glasses of wine. Someone invited me to join
them. I said I just had to get some dinner and fled. My only hope was Elliot’s bedroom. Surely no one would be eating in there.

The door was open. I started down the short hall that led from the main corridor to the bedroom. That was when I heard Elliot’s voice. He was saying something about doing things for your country. I started to turn around, but it was too late. Wally Dryer had seen me. He looked embarrassed. With good reason, I thought. He had moved into Charlie’s office at the magazine with unseemly speed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Not at all,” Elliot said. “We were just talking about JFK.”

There it was again, the martyred President, the slain national hero, the only death that mattered.

“So I heard. Ask not what your country can do for you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” My voice was acid.

I told Elliot I’d come looking for him to say good night. I was prepared for an argument. It was too early. Abby hadn’t had dessert. But he merely took the glass of wine I hadn’t realized I was holding and said he hoped Abby had enjoyed herself. He was good at reading people. I felt a wave of gratitude to him for that.

In the taxi on the way home, Abby was silent. I asked if she’d had a good time. The lighted trees sped past as I waited for an answer.

“I hate Patty Warren,” she said finally. Patty Warren was one of the girls she’d had dinner with in front of the fireplace.

I started to ask what Patty had done, then realized. When I’d gone back to the living room to tell Abby we were leaving, Patty had been sitting on her father’s lap.

IN THE WEEKS
after Charlie’s death, Elliot began stopping by the apartment every week or so, just for a moment he always said as soon as he arrived. He knew I did not want to ask him to stay for dinner. Maybe he even knew that these days I rarely had dinner. As I
said, he was an observant man. I sat at the table with Abby while she ate. After she went to bed, I drank.

He asked how we were getting along.

How in hell do you think we’re getting along?

“We’re fine.”

He inquired if we needed anything.

Charlie. We need Charlie
.

“Nothing.”

He reported on the police investigation. He was keeping in touch with the detective in charge. They had a few leads. He was sure justice would be done. I could not keep it in any longer. I laughed. The sound was like glass shattering.

He told me not to worry about financial matters. The foundation would take care of things until I got back on my feet. I almost laughed at that too. I was down for the count and not likely to get up again. He mentioned something about a life insurance policy. The term struck me as grotesque. Charlie’s death was proof that you could not ensure a life.

Nonetheless, I had to face practical matters. Abby had to eat, and have a roof over her head, and go to school. On New Year’s Eve, after I tucked her in and wished her a happy 1964, a phrase that sounded like a taunt, though I hadn’t intended it to, I poured myself a drink, carried it to the bedroom, and sat at the desk that used to be Charlie’s, that would always be Charlie’s. The green student’s lamp cast a lozenge of illumination over the surface. I took a swallow of my drink and got down to work.

I was not a stranger to Charlie’s desk. I had occasionally sat there to write checks for good causes or minor household expenses, but, except for that, I knew little about our finances, beyond Charlie’s salary, which had increased as the magazine had flourished, and the modest amount we had in a savings account. I doubted there was much more to know. Charlie had never kept anything from me, as I heard other men did from their wives. My old roommate, Natalie,
swore her husband, who was a lawyer, had money stashed in secret accounts all over town. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he even has some under the floorboards,” she’d told me once. I had no such suspicions of Charlie.

I spent the better part of an hour going through old checks, studying the small fake-leather-bound passbook of the savings account as if it were a code that had to be cracked, and adding and subtracting figures that I might as well have pulled out of a hat. I had no idea how much we needed to live. I had never drawn up a budget. I wasn’t extravagant, I was even capable of saving, though I could be impulsive. But living by the numbers struck me as spirit-killing. Nonetheless, I would have to have a budget now. I would also have to look for another apartment. Wally Dryer, Charlie’s old second in command, who had looked so embarrassed for moving into Charlie’s office so quickly when I’d come upon him in Elliot’s bedroom, said he wanted me to stay on as a contributing editor, but Abby and I could not go on living as we were on what
Compass
paid me. I remembered the soul-searching Charlie and I had done about sending her to private school. Now the lack of money trumped the moral issue. She would have to transfer to public school.

As I closed the top middle drawer and pulled open the deep one on the bottom left that served as a file cabinet, I thought of the widowed First Lady. She would not have to worry about keeping her children in school. I wasn’t complaining. In the financial department, I was more fortunate than most. But I would have to become practical.

I bent to the file drawer. I wasn’t a stranger to that either. Some of the folder labels were in my handwriting. Birth certificates. Diplomas. Military records. Abby: vaccinations, shots, illnesses. But when I’d taken out and put back those files, I had never paid much attention to the others in the drawer. Now I began walking my fingers through them. Apartment lease. Appliance warranties. Canceled checks. Charitable gifts. Expense accounts. Life insurance. My fingers
stopped. I knew the policy existed, and not only from Elliot’s mention of it. Shortly after Abby was born, Charlie had come home one evening and said he’d made an appointment with an insurance agent, a friend of Elliot’s, to talk about a policy. The idea had struck me as peculiar—more than peculiar, quixotic. Nothing in my life had ever been insured. I didn’t think it was possible. The idea had also been frightening. I did not like betting on Charlie’s mortality. I had changed the subject.

I lifted the folder out of the drawer, put it on the desk, and sat staring at it. The papers inside, like the death certificate and the will, would be one more piece of tangible evidence, the mounting proofs that Charlie was gone.

The carpet runner muffled my steps down the hall to the living room. On the way back, ice rattled in my glass and whiskey sloshed over onto the rug.

The folder was still waiting for me on top of the desk. I sat, took a long swallow of my drink, and opened it. My eyes moved over a jumble of words. Insured. Charles David Benjamin. Beneficiary. Cornelia Reeves Benjamin. Dates, conditions, stipulations. Wrongful death. Accidental death. Suicide null and void. Variations on a theme, each worse than the last or just as bad. My eyes skimmed over the page, then snagged on a figure. At first I thought the number was a mistake, but the words following it, wrapped neatly in parentheses, spelled it out. $300,000. (Three hundred thousand dollars.)

I sat staring at the figure and the words. Charlie could not have taken out a policy for three hundred thousand dollars. He would not have thought in sums that fantastic. It was a rich man’s number. A lottery pipe dream. Pie in the sky. Besides, he could not have afforded the premiums. I counted the zeros. I read the words again.

I tried to remember what he had told me when he’d bought the policy. I was sure he hadn’t mentioned the amount. Even someone cavalier about money and suspicious of and superstitious about insurance policies would have heard the rustle of all those zeros.

I went on staring at the numerals and the words. It was a windfall. Abby could stay in school. We would not have to move. So why wasn’t I relieved?

My eye moved down to the signature. Charles David Benjamin. The handwriting was familiar, but the man who had signed it was a stranger, or at least someone with a side I did not know.

I was about to close the folder when I noticed the signature beneath Charlie’s over the line that said “Witness.” Elliot J. McClellan. That explained it. Elliot had talked him into the policy. But I still didn’t understand where Charlie had found the money to pay the premiums.

A FEW NIGHTS
later, Elliot stopped in on the way home from his office. He had worked late, and Abby was already in bed. He said he was sorry he’d missed her. The statement was not mere politesse. Babies bored him, but budding minds and developing predilections intrigued him.

We went into the living room. I told him to make himself a drink. I had given up on graciousness. When we were settled at either end of the sofa, he asked how I’d gotten along during the New Year’s holiday. That was when I brought up Charlie’s life insurance policy.

“I had forgotten how much it was for,” I said.

The explanation wasn’t as implausible as it sounded. Once or twice Elliot had been around when Charlie had teased me about my indifference to money, until I crossed the threshold of Saks or Bergdorf’s. Besides, lots of things had slipped my mind in the past weeks.

“I still can’t imagine how we afforded the premiums.”

“Charlie was good with money.”

I remembered the night on Long Island when Charlie had told me we’d never be rich, but we wouldn’t starve.

“Charlie wasn’t that interested in money.”

“You’re not that interested in money. Charlie had a healthy respect for it. At least once Abby was born.”

“That explains why he bought such a big policy. It doesn’t explain how he paid for it.”

I didn’t know why I was pressing Elliot. I was the one who’d had joint checking and savings accounts with Charlie. But there was something here that didn’t make sense, and he was the one who had witnessed Charlie’s signature.

He pushed the hair back from his forehead with the heel of his hand and stared into his drink. “He didn’t,” he said finally.

“What do you mean he didn’t?”

He looked up at me. “The foundation did.”

“What?”

“The foundation bought the policy for him. It was his condition for staying at
Compass
.”

This was getting worse and worse. I’d had no idea that Charlie had ever thought of leaving
Compass
.

“I assumed you knew.”

He was lying. If he’d assumed I knew, he would not have been so skittish about telling me.

“He’d gotten an offer from
Fortune
.”

“Charlie would never have gone to work at
Fortune
.”

“He would have for you and Abby.”

“Not for me. He knew I would have hated it.”

“This was right after Abby was born. You’d barely have noticed.”

The words lingered after Elliot left. I was back in the months of Abby’s infancy, obsessed with her, oblivious to the world, careless of Charlie. He had told me about the policy and how much it was worth. He had even explained that the foundation was paying for it. But I had been too preoccupied to pay attention.

It was the face turned away from his kiss again. That, I was beginning to realize, was the dirty little secret of widowhood. Guilt, for the wrongs you can never make right, for the sins of omission and commission you can never undo, for the breaks of faith you can
never mend. Like Leningrad. The story of my life with Charlie had gone to press. There would be no more rewrites.

ELLIOT WAS NOT
the only one who came to the apartment. People arrived carrying concern like the casseroles they would have brought if we had lived a different kind of life. I wanted to be left alone, but the world was determined to keep me company.

Charlie’s parents came looking for traces of him and found them in Abby, not only in her eyes and her hair but in her turns of phrase. I noticed that too. I hadn’t been as aware when Charlie was alive, but now I realized they’d had a language of their own. I could speak it, but it didn’t come as naturally to me as it did to her.