The Three Weissmanns of Westport

4

They made their exodus from New York to Westport on a beautiful August day.

"It will be just like the commune," said Miranda, who, though her youth had caused her to miss out on the fun of the sixties by a scant couple of years, harbored a rich nostalgia for the period.

"Right. The one in the French Revolution." Had she really agreed to this? Although, when Annie allowed herself to do so, she did have to admit that with both boys gone, she was as lonely as she had ever been in her life.

The three Little Bo Peeps who have lost their sheeps, she thought. Betty minus Josie, Miranda minus the Awful Authors, Annie minus her children. Three minus everything equaled three zeroes. Three zeroes equaled pathos; emptiness; fear. Zero at the bone, she thought. The Emily Dickinson poem made her feel better for a moment. A transport of cordiality. Emily Dickinson made even fear feel rich and full and active.

From the backseat, she looked at her mother's profile as Betty drove her old Mercedes along the Merritt Parkway, exclaiming at the beauty of every stone bridge, remembering when this quaint, narrow, twisting road was new and modern, and Annie felt a wave of respect. Her mother was her own poet. Betty didn't need Emily Dickinson to tell her that seeing a snake dividing the grass like a comb was a shiver of mortality and that mortality was a sign of life. Betty could take pleasure in anything, even this exile. She could make her devastating divorce into a picnic, that word that had made her cry. That is what Josie had always said about Betty's excursions into unlikely optimism. "It's not a picnic," he would say, his voice full of exasperated love, and he and Betty would look at each other and smile. Annie leaned forward, the seat belt tight across her chest, and kissed her mother's cheek.

Betty made a loud kissing noise in response, but kept her eyes on the road. She and her parents had visited Westport frequently in her youth — whenever Aunt Millie checked herself in to the Westport Sanitarium, a large white mansion on the Post Road that then housed wealthy alcoholics and manic-depressives, both of which diagnoses described Aunt Millie. The sanitarium had been torn down years ago and turned into a park.

"Just terrible," Betty murmured, shaking her head at the unfortunate transformation as they drove past the vanished sanitarium, now rolling acres of parkland.

Annie raised her eyebrows and made a face, hoping to catch Miranda's eye in the rearview mirror. But Miranda was gazing out the window at what was now called Winslow Park and sighing in sympathetic, wistful appreciation of the lost mental institution. Miranda always sat in the front. She had gotten carsick in the back, ever since she was a child. As a teenager, Annie had wondered once when they were out driving with their parents if Miranda might not have grown out of it.

"I mean, how can we ever tell, if she never sits in the backseat again?" she asked her mother, who had been banished to the backseat beside her.

"That's the beauty of irony, dear," Betty had said, and Annie never brought it up again.

Now she momentarily panicked at the idea of the months ahead with her sister and mother, then firmly reminded herself that she had finally agreed to the Houghteling Cottage scheme only because she saw that if she did not, the two of them would go ahead without her and live in what they considered genteel poverty until there was not a cent left in either of their bank accounts, at which point they would have to move in with her.

She reminded herself that she still had an apartment, that she had sublet it, furnished, for only ten months. Surely within that time the evacuation to the suburbs would lose its charm for Betty and Miranda.

Betty turned onto a tree-shaded road that eventually led them to the shore. Long Island Sound lay before them in its comfortable modesty, a small, calm stretch of blue. The sky was clear and Long Island, a dark wavy line, was visible on the horizon.

Miranda said, "It's hardly Cape Cod."

"We don't have any cousins in Cape Cod." Her sister had been out to Westport countless times. Did she expect crashing waves and towering dunes?

Still Annie said in a coaxing voice, "Fitzgerald lived here. He and Zelda were kicked out of two houses in Westport, I think."

Miranda seemed mollified. "Two houses," she whispered, looking at the Sound with new respect.

"Zelda swam at Compo Beach," Annie added encouragingly, realizing as she spoke that she could quit the Y in New York and save a little money, swim here herself. "No waves, perfect length, up and down, and you've done your laps..."

"Oh, Annie. You and your laps."

The cottage, on the other hand, was another story. Annie's heart sank when they pulled into the narrow dirt driveway beside the house itself. It was an unpromising sight, a slightly lopsided structure built in 1929, its shingles painted a dull, tired gray. A sunporch ran the length of the front of the cottage, its louvered windows quaint and outdated and yellowed. An overgrown hedge rose on one side of a dirt path leading to the louvered front door. With one corner wedged in the dirt, the rickety gate stood open, as listless as an idling bystander, unconcerned with, unaware of, the ramshackle house. The hard dusty path sidled shamelessly into the patchy crabgrass.

The cottage.

It was a shack, a hut, a garden shed of a thing, stunted and unwashed.

"Oh," Annie said in dismay.

But her sister and mother were already out of the car and exclaiming with joy. It was so unspoiled! It was so old-fashioned, so perfectly old-fashioned! Think of all the barefooted children who had scampered up and down this path! The commuters in their fedoras, tired and grimy from the train! The two women were beside themselves.

"It's like camp!" Miranda cried.

"Girl Scout camp!" Betty cried in response.

Of course, Annie knew well enough that Betty would have tired of real Girl Scout camp the minute she wanted a hot bath and there was only a cold shower to be had, that Miranda would exclaim over the unspoiled nature of the cottage until the first hot night without air-conditioning. But Annie said nothing. She knew better than to confront her mother and sister when they were waxing poetic together. It would be like stepping into a dog fight. One had to wait, patient and quiet, until they wore themselves out.

Annie sometimes reflected that all those poor publishers who thought Miranda was bluffing or bullying had never understood Miranda's secret, which was supreme innocence. She was a good-looking woman: her face animated; her eyes, tapering at both ends, womanly and remote; and she had a slow, curling half-smile that people around her experienced as a moment of recognition, as if they'd been lavishly but secretly praised. When all was said and done, however, Miranda's greatest strength was a sublime ignorance that things could go other than she, in her benevolent excitement, had imagined them. She didn't worry about what the world thought of her or her tantrums, for the world existed only as imagined by her, and Miranda believed in her imagination the way others believed in God or capitalism: it was a force, and it was a force for good.

Annie, who was acutely aware of how the world viewed her, or at least of how she worried that the world viewed her, often watched her younger sister with wonder. Miranda was so unselfconscious that the older sister was deprived of even the bitter satisfaction of envy. In fact, Annie had always been proud of both her sister's beauty and her guileless, autocratic power.

On the other hand, Annie could not help but notice that her sister was extremely self-involved, and over the years, watching Miranda go through one disastrous love affair after another, she began to suspect that Miranda's preoccupation with herself was a kind of protection. Everywhere Miranda looked, she saw the world she insisted upon. This was her great tautological strength. It had fascinated and frustrated Annie since childhood. How could you ever win an argument with such a sister? How?

She asked herself this question again as they stood outside the cottage. The house hunched over the yard, shabby, uncomfortable, ill-tempered. Its closed windows, dead flies pressed like flowers beneath the heavy wood sills, were bleary, unseeing behind cataracts of grime. Large, smooth plots of pale dirt basked in the sun interrupted here and there by a few straggling, scratchy formations of crabgrass. There were two trees, one an evergreen brown and diseased at the top, the other a gnarled, barren fruit tree. The steps, two cracked concrete squares of faded gray, led up to the sunporch, several missing louvers of its jalousie windows gaping darkly.

Miranda, for her part, saw a tangle of dark green foliage and pale pink sea roses peeking from the side of the house. The roses were so small and jumbled, their flowers one petal deep, the yellow heart so exposed. Above them, a squirrel rattled a branch. Miranda looked up and watched the squirrel, a fat gray being balanced on delicate little toes. The white clouds of late summer flew by overhead, the sky as deep a blue as a daytime sky could be. She could smell the briny sea. On the chafed lawn, there was a patch of rich green moss in the shade from the house. Miranda took off her shoes and stood on the soft, cool moss. She touched the trunk of the old tree beside her, her fingers stroking the ridges of iron gray bark.

"We will be happy here," Betty said.

Miranda smiled at her mother. "We already are."

Miranda and Betty were still exclaiming at the potential of the peeling hut, Annie's heart was still sinking in silent dismay, when there was a sudden commotion at the front door, which flung itself open to reveal a bald, pink-faced man dressed in bright golf clothes and holding a broom.

Cousin Lou handed the broom to Annie, apologized about the missing windowpanes, promised workmen and replacements. He then invited them to dinner that night. "Don't disappoint me." He shook his head, his pink jowls shuddering with alarm. "Don't."

He pointed to the mailbox.

"I ordered it just for you, but look how the idiots painted your name!"

The mailbox was a fat, new, shiny affair, and on both sides, in bold black letters, it said: the wisemen.

They did not go to dinner that night, despite the imploring swing of Cousin Lou's jowls. They waited for the moving van, then began to unpack the boxes. Annie and Miranda had the two bedrooms on the ground floor, their mother the large attic room upstairs.

"My childhood furniture," Annie said, sitting on the mahogany sleigh bed Betty had gotten her at an auction when she was twelve. "It's much nicer than my own furniture." Still, over the years, Annie had acquired one or two pieces she was fond of. Would the visiting French professor and his wife leave cigarette burns on the arms of her chairs? Already, she could not wait to get back to her apartment.

Miranda, in contrast, was quite giddy. "I feel like we're in a dollhouse," she said. "And we're the dolls."

Annie shuddered.

"It's an adventure," Miranda said.

"An adventure in claustrophobia."

"You'll see."

Miranda often said You'll see. Annie found it oddly comforting, as if Miranda knew what was coming, knew that everything would be all right, knew how to make it be all right.

"Do you think Mom seems a little shell-shocked?" Annie asked.

"We're our own dolls," Miranda said, as if she had not heard Annie. "In our own dollhouse."

Upstairs, Betty was staring out the attic window. She could hear Miranda and Annie talking downstairs. The sound was soft and indistinct, but familiar, like a memory. So much seemed like a memory these days. This blue sky with its banks of white clouds was a memory. And this town: leaning against an old black Buick at the station, waiting for Joseph's train, the girls chattering just as they were doing now, that same sky arched high above them; the train chugging into sight, giving its great slow sigh as it braked. Then, out of its door stepped another memory: her husband. Her husband, Joseph.

"Can you see the water?" Annie asked, clumping up the stairs.

"It's beautiful."

"Oh, look, a sailboat."

"This is my widow's walk," Betty said.

It would be worth everything, Annie thought, if her mother could be happy here. Betty's hair, a very pretty auburn created at great expense by an Italian colorist at Frederic Fekkai, was surrounded by a nimbus of light. Annie put her arms around her and rested her cheek on the auburn head. Outside, in the distance, gulls wheeled in the blue sky. "Don't be sad," she said.

"Oh no." Betty patted her daughter's hand to reassure her. "I'm a merry widow."

This, to Annie and Miranda's surprise, turned out to be all too true. In the days to come, not only was Betty merry, but she insisted that she was, literally, a widow.

"Poor, dear Joseph," she said when they finally accepted Cousin Lou's invitation to dinner. "God rest his soul."

Lou raised an eyebrow and looked at Annie. Annie shrugged. "Mom's a widow," she said. "Didn't you know?"

"Don't be fresh," Betty said, and swept into the living room in her black linen pants and tunic.

Cousin Lou was not one to argue with anyone who was kind enough to accept his hospitality. He took Annie and Miranda, each on one arm, and escorted them into the big living room that overlooked the water. They were on a hill, and their view of the Sound was unimpeded except by the many figures who stood in front of the glass walls. There was an artist and a pianist, a Holocaust scholar, a psychiatrist, a young Internet mogul, several Wall Street people, two surgeons, an architect, and a lawyer — all of them with spouses, all of their spouses with their own careers. Lou introduced all his guests simply by their first names, as if they were family pets, even patting their heads now and then. It was only after he steered Annie and Miranda over to a woman dressed in white and perched on the arm of the sofa who, he reminded them, was his wife, that they learned in great detail the last names and occupations of the guests they had just been introduced to. Annie had half expected Lou to note that his wife was "like family," but instead, he hurried off and left Rosalyn to nod her rather large head in the direction of each specimen they'd just met and relate in a loud, rasping whisper what that person did professionally.

"They seem very distinguished," Annie said, sensing that was what Rosalyn required.

"I am drawn to exceptional people," Rosalyn said. "It is my vice." Then she smiled at the absurdity of someone like herself having something as tasteless as a vice.

"They're like family," Miranda offered.

Rosalyn raised an eyebrow at her. "One cannot choose one's family," she said. "Can one?"

"No," Annie said drily, noting simultaneously though silently that even when one, that is to say Rosalyn, stood, one was no taller than one had been when seated on the arm of the sofa. Annie smiled at Cousin Rosalyn. "Families are fate."

Rosalyn's prominent head balanced rather precariously on what came below, like a blowsy rose on a stem plucked bare of its leaves. The circumference of her head was emphasized by her hair, which was thin but of an intensely hued blond arranged in a helmet of great volume. Annie watched it revolve, slowly, like a golden globe, toward her mother, who now approached them in her beautifully tailored linen.

"Widow's weeds," Betty explained with a sad smile when Rosalyn admired her outfit.