Commonwealth

9

Fix was still alive the Christmas after Teresa Cousins died. Impossible but true. It would be his last Christmas, but then the last two Christmases had been his last Christmas, as this past Thanksgiving was his last Thanksgiving. Franny didn’t want to leave Kumar and the boys again for the holidays, nor did she want to bring them with her to Santa Monica. It was too depressing. Franny and Caroline also considered the question of their mother who had been increasingly neglected in every year it was taking their father to die.

“Dad’s not the only one to worry about,” Caroline said, thinking of their mother’s husband. Their mother confided in Caroline now, maybe more than she did in Franny. This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out. Caroline and her mother had become very close.

“I’m flipping a coin,” Caroline said over the phone. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

“I trust you,” Franny said. There was no one she trusted more than Caroline.

“Heads you go to Dad’s for Christmas, tails I go to Dad’s.” This was what they’d come to, an instant of anticipatory silence and then the clatter of a quarter coming to rest on Caroline’s kitchen table in San Jose.

The plane had circled in a holding pattern for forty-five minutes before delivering Franny, Kumar, and the boys to Dulles in harrowing weather — snow and pitch-black dark. Ravi, fourteen, and Amit, twelve, sat in the back of the rental car, earbuds stuffed deep into their ears, their heads bobbing gently in discordant time. The boys had been untroubled by the icy skid of the landing gear against the runway, just as they were untroubled by the interstate to Arlington, which was a soup of accidents and ice, cars crawling back to the suburbs like beaten dogs, holiday travelers anxious to arrive on time, holiday travelers desperate to flee. Franny called her mother to tell her not to hold dinner. There was no saying how late they’d be.

“Be as late as you need to be,” her mother said. “If things get bad we’ll eat the onion dip.” She always made onion dip for Ravi, who liked things salted, and a caramel cake for Amit, who liked things sweet.

“As if my mother has ever eaten onion dip,” Franny said to Kumar after hanging up her phone. She was inching the car forward while Kumar attended to the last of his work e-mails. Kumar worked in the mergers and acquisitions department in the behemoth Martin and Fox. He was making plans to defend his client from a hostile takeover even as his wife drove through the blinding snow. It was only fair. Had they been going to see his mother in Bombay she would not have been driving.

“I’ve never seen your mother eat anything,” Kumar said, his thumbs burning up the screen on his phone. “Which is my best proof that she is a goddess.”

Beverly and Jack Dine were both in their sixties when they married: hers early, his late. Kumar had only known Franny’s mother as Jack Dine’s wife, the empress of the Arlington car dealerships, and so he regarded her as happy and powerful, a source of bejeweled splendor. Kumar believed his mother-in-law to be the person she was in this present moment, free from history, and in return for that gift Beverly loved him like a son.

Jack Dine’s house had once been owned by a four-term senator from Pennsylvania. It had a wall and a gate, but they kept the gate open and for Christmas draped the wall in swags of pine punctuated by oversized wreaths. The great circular driveway was parked up with cars. Every light in every window was on, the lights pinned to the high branches of the trees were on, and the snow threw back the light and illuminated the world. From the car they could see all the people through the long front windows packed together like dolls in an enormous dollhouse.

“Is she having a party for us?” Amit asked from the backseat. At their grandmother’s house anything was possible. There were only a few parking spots left down at the end of the driveway, and so they wrestled their bags from the back and made their way through the snow.

“Merry Christmas!” Beverly said when she threw the door open. She hugged Amit first, then Ravi, then hugged them both together, each in one arm. Beverly’s seventy-eight could rival anyone else’s sixty-five. She had stayed slim and blond while having the sense to never push things too far. A life spent as a great beauty was still clearly in evidence. Behind her the house was full and overflowing, lights and pine and glasses of champagne. The Christmas tree in the living room brushed the ceiling with its highest branches and seemed to have been encrusted with diamonds and pink sapphires. Somewhere on the other side of the house someone was playing the piano. Women were laughing.

“You didn’t tell us you were having a party,” Franny said.

“We always have a Christmas Eve party,” Beverly said. She was wearing a smart red dress, three ropes of pearls. “Now would you please come in the house and not stand on the porch like a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

Kumar and Franny pulled in their luggage and brushed the snow off their shoulders and hair. At least Kumar was wearing a suit. They had picked him up from the office on the way to the airport. But Franny and the boys looked like nothing but the disheveled travelers they were. The boys had seen guests walking around with plates heaped with food and so they dropped their bags and headed for the dining room to find the buffet. The boys were always starving.

“It isn’t Christmas Eve,” Franny said.

“Matthew’s family is going skiing in Vail for Christmas so I moved the party up. It was easier for everyone this way. Really, I think I’ll always have it on the twenty-second.”

“But you didn’t tell us.”

Kumar leaned in and kissed Beverly on the cheek. “You look beautiful,” he said, changing the subject.

“Franny!” A heavyset man past middle age wearing a red houndstooth button-up vest came and swept her up in too zealous a hug, shaking her back and forth while making growling sounds. “How’s my favorite sister?”

“That’s only because Caroline isn’t here,” Beverly said. “You should see the way he makes over Caroline.”

“Caroline gives me free legal advice,” Pete said.

“If you get sued over the holidays I’d be happy to help,” Kumar said.

Pete turned and looked at Kumar, trying to place him. His face lit up with pleasure when finally he was able to put it all together. “That’s right,” he said to Franny. “I forgot he was a lawyer too.”

“Merry Christmas, Pete,” Franny said. Surely she would burst into tears at some point in the evening. It was only a question of how long she could hold off.

“Pete and his family are going to New York to see Katie and the new baby,” Beverly said. “Did I tell you Katie had her baby?”

“Christmas in New York.” Pete smiled and his teeth made Franny think of ivory, like elephant’s tusks carved down to the size of human teeth. He was drinking eggnog from a small crystal cup. “Can you imagine that? Sure you can. You’re a city girl. Are you still in Chicago?”

“Let them go upstairs and settle in,” Beverly said to Pete. “They’ll be back in a minute. They just got off the plane.”

But then Jack Dine was there, wearing a needlepoint vest, a leaping stag rendered convincingly in small stitches. Jack had always been such a big man, tall and broad, though now he seemed no larger than his wife. “Who’s the pretty girl?” he asked, pointing to Franny.

Beverly put her arm around her husband. “Jack, this is Franny, my Franny. You remember.”

“She looks like you,” Jack said.

“And Kumar. Do you remember him?”

“He can get the bags,” Jack said, waving him away. “Go on now. Take them upstairs.”

Kumar smiled, though it would be hard to say how. He was a generous man, and the boys weren’t there to bear witness.

“Jack,” Franny said, putting her hand on her stepfather’s trembling forearm. “Kumar’s my husband.”

But Kumar was not about to miss his exit. He would take what was available. “Sir,” he said and nodded his head. Somehow, in an impossible feat of balance and strength, he managed to scoop all of it up. He looped the boys’ duffels across his chest.

“Go through the kitchen,” Jack said when Kumar had taken a single step in the direction of the sweeping staircase. The luggage was just about to overtake him, and still he turned and took the bags to the kitchen. There was a narrow back staircase that the servants had used when there were servants.

“They think they can go right through the middle of your party,” Jack said to Franny, his eyes tracking Kumar’s back. “You’ve got to watch all the time.”

“That was my husband,” Franny said. Was she choking? She had the strangest feeling in her throat.

Jack patted her hand. “Tell me what I can get the pretty lady to drink.”

“I’m fine, Jack.” Franny had thought that she had won the toss. When she heard the quarter come down on Caroline’s table, when Caroline told her to go and spend Christmas in Virginia, she thought she had gotten the better deal. Now Franny found that she was longing for her dying father, her father who was nearly dead.

“I’ll get you some eggnog,” Jack Dine said and then turned and walked back into the crowd.

“Worse.” Pete followed his father with his eyes. “In case you didn’t catch that. He’s a lot worse. Has he started any fires yet?”

“Why would you say that?” Beverly asked, her voice gone flat. She loved Jack Dine, or she had loved him when he was still someone she knew. His sons, on the other hand, often required more consideration than she cared to give.

“Because sooner or later he will,” Pete said. He was scanning the crowd, looking for someone better to talk to. “Matthew!” He raised a hand and waved to his brother. “Look! Franny’s home.”

Matthew Dine’s vest was black, but he wore a gold watch chain with a small red Christmas ornament hanging from it, a single glass ball that made him look more festive than all the rest of them. Franny had forgotten that Jack Dine’s Christmas parties required vests for men. Glancing across the room the theme emerged: women in red, men in vests. Matthew took both of Franny’s hands in his hands, kissed her on the cheek. “You haven’t made it three steps past the door,” he said in a solemn voice.

Franny liked Matthew the best. Everyone did. “Where’s Rick?” she said, thinking she might as well get all three of the brothers out of the way before she tried to fight a path to the staircase.

“Rick has his nose out of joint about something,” Beverly said. “He said he wasn’t coming.”

“He’ll come,” Matthew said. “Laura Lee and the girls are already here.”

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats. Franny couldn’t keep them straight. She knew the Dine boys, that’s what they were called late into their fifties, but their wives and second wives confused her, their children, in some cases two sets, some grown and married, others still small. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. There were members of the Dine family who considered her in some vague sense to be a sister, a cousin, a daughter, an aunt. Katie Dine in New York had a baby. She couldn’t follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related. Jack Dine’s first wife, Peggy, had died more than twenty years ago but Peggy Dine’s sisters, along with their husbands and children and children’s spouses and their children, were still invited to the party every year — cherished guests! Every year they came and stood in the house that had once been their sister’s and catalogued the changes while eating the canapés that Beverly had made herself — the new sofa and a different color of living room paint and the painting of birds above the fireplace — it was a desecration of Peggy’s memory. The rearrangement of objects was more than they could bear.

The guests were catching on to the fact that Beverly’s daughter had arrived, and the ones who knew her were anxious to see her, and the ones who didn’t know her had heard so much about her. Matthew leaned towards her, whispered in her ear, “Run.”

Franny gave her mother a kiss. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

She went through the kitchen, where two black men in black pants with white shirts and vests and ties piled ham biscuits onto silver trays, while a third man arranged boiled shrimp around a cut-glass bowl of cocktail sauce on a massive silver platter. They didn’t lift their heads from their work when she came through the room. If they saw her at all they said nothing about it. She went up the back stairs to the room where she and Kumar always slept. All of the Dine boys lived in town, all in beautiful houses of their own, so even at Christmas there was never a worry about space. In his retirement Jack Dine’s empire had been divided three ways, giving Matthew the Toyotas, Pete the Subarus, and Rick the Volkswagens. Rick, who was lazy, was also bitter, and often said it wasn’t fair that Matthew got Toyota. No one could compete with Toyota. He particularly envied his brother the Prius.

Franny opened the door quietly and found her husband lying on top of the bedspread in the dark. His jacket and tie were hanging in the closet, his shoes tucked beneath the bed. Kumar had always been neat, even when they were in law school. She dropped her coat and scarf on the floor, pushed out of her snow boots.

“I would feel very sorry for myself,” he said quietly, his hands folded over his stomach, his eyes closed, “except that I’m feeling sorry for you.”

“Thank you,” she said and crawled the length of the vast mattress to lie beside him.

He put his arm around her, kissed her hair. “A different couple would make love now.”

Franny laughed, pushing her face into his shoulder. “A couple whose children wouldn’t be walking in the room any minute.”

“A couple whose host wouldn’t shoot the son-in-law for miscegenation.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Franny said.

“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.

“The ghost of Christmas past,” he said when she stepped into his arms.

“I should have called you sooner,” Franny said. “It’s all been sort of last-minute.”

Bert did not invite her in, nor did he let her go. He only stood there holding Franny to his chest. Always she was the baby he had carried around Fix Keating’s party, the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. “Last-minute works for me,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m freezing.”

Inside the door she took off her shoes.

“I made a fire in the den when you called. It hasn’t really caught yet but it’s starting.”

Franny remembered the first time she’d ever been inside this house. She must have been thirteen. The den was why they’d bought the place, the big stone hearth, the fireplace big enough for a witch’s pot, the way the room looked out over the pool. She thought it was a palace then. Bert had no business keeping this house, it was entirely too big for one person. But on this night Franny was grateful he’d held on to it, if only so she could come home.

“Let me get you a drink,” he said.

“Maybe just some tea,” she said. “I’m driving.” She stood up on the hearth and flexed her stocking feet on the warm stones. She and Albie would come downstairs in the winter late at night when they were in high school and open up the flue when it was too cold to go outside and smoke. They would lean back into the fireplace with their cigarettes and blow the smoke up the chimney. They would drink Bert’s gin and throw away the empty bottles in the kitchen trash with impunity. If either parent noticed the dwindling stock in the liquor cabinet or the way the empties were piling up, neither one of them ever mentioned it.

“Have a drink, Franny. It’s Christmas.”

“It’s December twenty-second. Why does everyone keep telling me it’s Christmas?”

“Barmaid’s gin and tonic.”

Franny looked at him. “Barmaid’s,” she said sternly. Bert had shown her that trick when she was a girl and would play bartender for their parties. If a guest was already drunk she should pour a glass of tonic and ice and then float a little gin on the top without mixing it up. The first sip would be too strong, Bert told her, and that’s all that mattered. After the first sip drunks didn’t pay attention.

“If you get sloppy you can sleep in your old room.”

“My mother would love that.” It was always a trick getting out to see Bert. For all the times that Beverly had forgiven him, she couldn’t understand that Franny and Caroline might forgive him as well.

“How is your mother?” Bert asked. He handed Franny her drink, and the first sip — straight gin — was right on the money.

“My mother is exactly herself,” Franny said.

Bert pressed his lips together and nodded. “I would expect nothing less. I hear old Jack Dine is slipping though, that she’s having a hard time taking care of him. I hate to think of her having to deal with that.”

“It’s what we’ll all have to deal with sooner or later.”

“Maybe I’ll give her a call, just to see how she’s doing.”

Oh, Bert, Franny thought. Let it go. “What about you?” she said. “How are you doing?”

Bert had made his own drink, a gin with a splash of tonic floating on the top to balance her out, and came to sit on the sofa. “I’m not so bad for an old man,” he said. “I still get around. If you’d called me tomorrow you would have missed me.”

Franny stabbed at the logs with the fireplace poker to encourage the flame. “Where are you going tomorrow?”

“Brooklyn,” he said. Franny turned around to look at him, poker in hand, and he smiled enormously. “Jeanette invited me for Christmas. There’s a hotel two blocks from where they live. It’s nice enough. I’ve been up there a couple of times to see them now.”

“That’s really something,” Franny said, and she came to sit next to Bert on the couch. “I’m happy for you.”

“We’ve been doing better these last couple of years. I e-mail with Holly too. She says that I can come to Switzerland and see her in that place she lives, the commune. I keep telling her I’ll meet her in Paris. I think that Paris is a good compromise. Everybody likes Paris. I took Teresa there for our honeymoon. That would have been what? Fifty-five years ago? I think it’s time to go back.” He stopped himself then, remembering something. “You were out there, weren’t you, when Teresa died? I think Jeanette told me that.”

“Caroline and I took her to the hospital. We were with Dad.”

“Well, that was nice of you.”

Franny shrugged. “I wasn’t going to leave her.”

“How is your dad?”

Franny shook her head, thinking of her father. How is old Bert? Fix would always say. “I’d tell you he wasn’t going to make it until New Year’s but I’m sure I’d be wrong.”

“Your father’s a tough guy.”

“My father’s a tough guy,” Franny said, thinking of the gun in his bedside table and how she had declined to help him when he asked. She’d done worse than that. She’d taken the gun to the police department in Santa Monica later, turned it in along with the bullets.

“I’m going to float a little more gin in there,” Bert said.

“A tiny bit,” Franny said, and handed back the glass. She wasn’t drunk and so she was sadly aware that all the gin was gone now.

“We’re not even up to half a jigger yet.” Bert made his way to the bar at the side of the room.

“Just be careful.”

“I remember seeing your father again after your christening party,” Bert said. “I saw him at the courthouse. I don’t know, maybe I saw him all the time and never knew it before, but that Monday he came up to me and shook my hand, said he was glad I’d come. ‘Glad you could come to Franny’s party,’ is what he said.” He handed Franny her drink.

“It was a long time ago, Bert.”

“Still,” Bert said. “It bothers me to think of him now, so sick. I never had anything against your father.”

“Do you hear from Albie?” she said, wanting to change the subject. It was a question she could have asked Albie but for some reason she never did. They didn’t talk about Bert. Even all those years ago when they’d lived together under this roof they didn’t talk about him.

“Not so much. Every now and then one of us gives it a try but we haven’t had a lot of success. Albie was very attached to his mother, you know. That’s the way it happens — girls to their fathers and boys to their mothers. I don’t think he ever got over my leaving his mother.” For Bert the past was always right there with him, and so he assumed that everyone else felt the same way.

“You should give him a call. It’s a tough time of year now, with Teresa gone.” Franny thought of her own father, of this time next year.

“I’ll call him on Christmas,” he said. “I’ll call from Jeanette’s.”

Franny wanted to tell him it was three hours earlier in California and that he could call his son tonight, could call him right now, but Bert wasn’t going to call Albie and there was no sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She pressed through the fizzy sweetness of the tonic and drained the glass down to the ice and the lime. “I wish I could stay,” Franny said, and part of her meant it. She would have liked to go upstairs to her room and lie down on her bed, though what were the chances that the bed was still there?

Bert nodded. “I know. I’m just glad you came by at all. I really appreciate that.”

“What time are you flying out?”

“Early,” he said. “That way I’ll beat the traffic.”

Franny got up and gave her stepfather a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Merry Christmas,” Bert said, and when he stepped back to look at her his eyes were damp. “Be careful now. If anything happened to you your mother would kill me.”

Franny smiled and gave him a kiss, thinking that Bert still saw the world in terms of what Beverly would and would not forgive him for. She stepped into her shoes beside the front door and let herself out into the snow. Inside the house Bert was turning off the lights, and she stood there on the front porch for a minute and watched the snow come to rest on the sleeves of her velvet dress. She was thinking about the night she couldn’t find Albie. Bert was in his study downstairs working and her mother was in the kitchen going over her French homework. It was long past dinner. It was snowing just like this and the house was perfectly quiet. Franny was wondering where Albie was. Usually by this time he had come into her room to do his homework or talk to her instead of doing his homework. She was lying across her bed reading The Return of the Native for AP English. It wasn’t that he came in every night, but if he wasn’t in her room then she could usually hear him, watching television, walking around. She kept listening until finally she put the book down and went to look for him. He wasn’t in his bedroom or the bathroom or the den or in the living room where he never went anyway. When she had looked everywhere in the house she could think of she went into the kitchen.

“Where’s Albie?” Franny asked her mother.

Her mother shook her head and made a little sound that stood in for the words no idea. Her mother never did learn to speak French.

“If you see him would you let me know?”

Her beautiful mother, maybe embarrassed now, looked up from her book for just a second and nodded. “Sure,” she said.

Franny didn’t think of knocking on the door to Bert’s study and asking him if he’d seen Albie, or checking to see if maybe Albie was in there with him. The thought never crossed her mind.

Instead, she went out the back door. She was still wearing her uniform from school: a plaid skirt and kneesocks, saddle oxfords, a sweatshirt from track over her white blouse. Her mother didn’t tell her to put on a coat or ask her where she was going the way she would have had Franny walked out the back door on a snowy night a few years before. Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.

Franny looked in the garage but Albie wasn’t in the garage. She walked a circle around the house and then went down the street, walking two houses down in one direction, three houses down in the other. She looked at the snow for bicycle tracks but there was nothing there, only her own footprints going in every direction. She was chilled now and her hair was getting wet. She was a little worried but only a little. She was thinking she could find him. She decided to go back to the house for her coat and as she was coming up the driveway she saw him, just a few inches of the side of his head behind the boxwoods beside the front door. He was wrapped in his red sleeping bag, staring up at the snow.

“Albie?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Freezing,” Albie said.

“Well don’t. Come inside.” She walked across the soft snow covering the lawn until she was standing right in front of him.

“I’m too high,” he said.

Around every streetlight, every porch light, there was a soft halo of snow. Everything else was dark. “No one’s going to notice.”

“They will,” he said. “I’m really high.”

“You can’t stay out here.” Franny was starting to shiver. She was wondering what she had been thinking of, going out without her coat.

“I can,” he said. His voice was so light, so airy, as if it were part of the snow.

Franny stepped between the boxwoods, thinking she would have to pull him up. Albie was taller than she was now but he was skinny, and anyway he wouldn’t fight her. But as soon as she got back there with him she understood the appeal of this particular spot, the way you could see all things without being seen. The overhang of the roof kept them out of the snow for the most part. She could smell the pot on him now, sweet and strong. Franny and Albie drank together sometimes, and they smoked cigarettes, but they didn’t smoke pot together. Later that would change.

“Let me in,” she said.

And just like that Albie raised up his arm, never taking his eyes off the snow, and she sat down beside him. The sleeping bag was filled with down and when they were wrapped up together it was remarkably warm. They sat there like that, their backs up against the brick of the house, the coarse hedge just in front of them. They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones who were falling.

“I miss my mother,” Albie said. In the one year when they were very close it was the only time he said it, and he only said it that night because he was very high.

“I know,” Franny said, because she did know. She knew it exactly, and she pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them and they stayed there together just like that until she lost the feeling in her feet and she told him they had to go inside.

“I lost the feeling in my feet a long time ago,” he said.

They put their arms around one another in order to stand. The front door was locked so they went down the driveway, dragging the sleeping bag behind them. Franny’s mother wasn’t in the kitchen anymore but the light was still on beneath the door to Bert’s study.

“I told you no one would know if you were high,” Franny said, and for some reason this cracked Albie up. He sat down on the floor and pulled the sleeping bag over his head, laughing while Franny got out the cereal and the milk.

Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.