The Three Weissmanns of Westport

5

Frederick Barrow was what Miranda could only call a pleasant-looking man — not, therefore, her type. He had a puckish, friendly face and his hair was thinning, not a distinguished receding hairline like Josie's, just thin, combed back and a bit too artistically long. Miranda was sorry on that score and disappointed for Annie. But, as she loyally pointed out to her mother, what hair he had was silver. And he had kind eyes. They called to mind an old dog's eyes, so dark and earnest, but that she did not say out loud. She reminded herself, instead, that she loved dogs and had often thought of adopting one from a shelter. A shepherd mix. Or a misunderstood pit bull. Immediately after this thought, she felt a rush of warmth for Frederick Barrow, as if he had himself rescued a large abandoned dog that very moment or, an even more compelling alternative, was wagging his tail against the wire confines of his cage, whimpering, his head appealingly tilted to one side, as he waited for Miranda to liberate him from his cramped prison.

In fact, at that moment Frederick Barrow was standing at a podium in front of them reading in a singsong voice that made Miranda sleepy.

"He has kind eyes," she whispered to her mother.

Thinking really they were mischievous eyes, Betty whispered back, "A triumph for Annie."

Miranda wondered if she meant the turnout at the reading — which was enormous — or Annie's friendship with Barrow.

"A feather in her cap," she whispered, to cover her bases.

A serious, twiggy young man in a hand-knit muffler turned from the seat in front and glared at them, and Miranda was quiet. A wool scarf in the August heat spelled lunatic. Lunatics must not be disturbed.

Readings. If there was an upside to the recent implosion of her career, it was her release from the obligation of attending readings. Yet here she was, back in the saddle, daydreaming, pretending to listen, leaning her head to one side, then the other, to stretch her stiff, aching neck. But this reading was different. It was not for one of the Awful Authors. It was for Annie.

She watched Frederick turn a page. He was dressed in khaki pants and a stiffly ironed blue oxford shirt with a frayed collar. He wore faded blue boat sneakers. His voice rocked back and forth, a cradle of words, in the treetops, rocking, rocking. She tuned in for a minute to what the cradle contained. Something bleak. Something violent. A nightmarish creature, a Rosemary's baby of snarling prose, rocked softly in the writer's gentle voice. She let the meaning of the words drift past her, soothed by the sound of them, by the writer's sympathetic voice, by his kind eyes.

"Such bright, kind eyes," she said to Annie when the reading was over.

Annie smiled. She looked at Frederick, seated at a long table signing books. "He was wonderful."

She had been wary of meeting him at first. His work, highly regarded by many, was off-putting for Annie, embodying the qualities she disliked in both the Jewish writers of his generation (that showing off masked as neurosis) and the Wasps (the coldness masked as modesty). But Frederick had surprised her, for he was not at all like his novels. He seemed in fact that rarest and to Annie most welcome combination of qualities: both truly modest and truly neurotic.

"We look forward to seeing more of Frederick Barrow," Betty said.

"Maybe when his next book comes out," Annie said. "I'm trying to get Alice Munro for our next reading."

"Oh, Annie, don't be silly."

"I know. She probably won't come."

"Oh, Annie," Betty repeated, shaking her head. "You're impossible."

"Don't be coy," Miranda added. "I hate coyness in an adult woman."

"Do you like it in a young woman?" Annie said, as she was mercifully called away to speak to the volunteers who were folding chairs.

She glanced at Frederick and saw he was surrounded by young women and middle-aged men. An interesting demographic. Where did she fit in?

When the crowd had dispersed, Frederick stayed at the table, sitting on top of it now rather than behind it, talking to two young people, an ascetic-faced woman with incongruously large baby blue eyes, in her early thirties, Annie guessed, and a young man perhaps a year or two younger dressed in expensive casual clothes. Everything he wore looked soft, burnished, delectable: his light cotton sweater — or was it silk — his narrow pants. Annie wanted to touch them, every article of clothing. Even his buttery Ferragamo loafers. Like the lunatic in the audience, he was wearing a scarf, but it was of sheer white cotton lawn.

I do not fit in, that's where, Annie thought in answer to her own question.

Frederick saw her and waved her over.

"This is Gwen... and this is Evan," he said, smiling at the two young people. "My children."

Annie tried not to survey them with too obvious curiosity. But she had heard so much about this son and daughter. Gwen had some sort of consulting business she ran from home, Annie remembered. Her husband was a lawyer or a doctor or a banker, she couldn't remember which, only that he "made a living," as her grandmother used to say. They had two small children, twin girls, who took violin lessons with tiny violins and played soccer in tiny uniforms. Evan had just left one job in public relations for another — Frederick had received that news during one of his dinners with Annie. "As long as he's not on my payroll," he'd said when he got off the phone, and Annie, who revered her children and would never have spoken sarcastically about them to anyone but herself, had been a little shocked at his disloyalty, then had quickly chastised herself as a humorless Jewish mother. Frederick had mentioned that Evan's girlfriend, with whom he had just broken up, was a model, something Evan himself immediately inserted into the conversation now, as if both she and the breakup were one of his professional credentials. He looked rather like a model himself, a tall handsome young man, and Annie thought she caught him making a model face in the window's nighttime reflection, pursing his lips, glaring, pulling in his chin just a fraction.

"So you're the famous Annie," Gwen said with a distinct lack of warmth.

"Dad talks so much about you," Evan said, and Annie got the impression that, like his sister, he would have preferred that "Dad" find a new topic of conversation.

"Annie, I was hoping I could take you out to a celebratory dinner tonight," Frederick said.

"Don't you think you should be getting back, Dad?" Evan said. "I don't like the idea of you driving so far at night."

Frederick laughed. "You guys," he said.

"It's a six-hour drive," his daughter said sharply. "Six and a half."

"Isn't it lucky I don't have a curfew?"

Even as he said it, Annie could see that although Frederick may not have had a curfew, it would be enforced. She and Frederick were not going out to dinner that night. Children were tyrants.

Felicity had come to the reading to hear her brother, and as Felicity approached the table, her turquoise eyes wide as always, Annie noticed how much Gwen resembled her. Perhaps those eyes remained wide as she slept. Or rolled open like a doll's.

"You mustn't monopolize the star," she said to Annie.

"No, of course not."

"I mean, I am his sister." And she gave Annie a meaningful look, the meaning of which Annie could not make out.

Annie pointed to her own sister, as if that would somehow justify her standing by the table. "There's my sister," she said, and she waved Miranda over, signaling desperation by the childhood code of tapping her left eyebrow with her right pinky, a gesture distinctive enough for a trained sister to recognize but not quite awkward enough to arouse suspicion.

"Your father has a beautiful reading voice, don't you think?" Miranda said when she was introduced to Gwen and Evan. "I think this book is extremely powerful. The prose is so vigorous..."

The pro forma remarks, into which Miranda was politely inserting as much sincerity as she could muster, would have gone on, but Annie interrupted her with a blunt "My sister's an agent."

"Oh yes," Gwen said. "We know." She gave Miranda a cold smile.

"Infamy becomes me," Miranda said.

"Everything becomes you, beautiful Miranda," Frederick offered, rather gallantly, Annie thought. "'In thy face I see the map of honour, truth, and loyalty,'" he added in the exaggerated way people do when they are quoting.

"Lovely family, too," Felicity said, with her pie eyes looking almost challenging. "But then why shouldn't they be?"

"Where are you off to that's so many hours away?" Annie asked Frederick. She did not even bother to add "after dinner." Somehow that was settled — there would be no dinner. No discussion, no dinner, just settled.

"The Cape."

"Why you want to live there I do not understand," said Gwen. "The summer, yes. But winter?"

"Your father is sentimental," Felicity said. "Not that it has done him any harm. In the way of real estate appreciation."

"Oh, I love Cape Cod in the winter," said Miranda. "To stand high up on one of those dunes, your bare feet numb in the cold sand, the wind blowing, the crash of the waves... It's incredibly romantic."

"I hope you won't be too disappointed if I tell you that what I like about going up there, especially in the winter, is the quiet. It's so" — he thought for a moment — "so unencumbered."

Annie turned that unexpected word over in her mind. Unencumbered.

"Well, that's not romantic at all," Miranda said, and her voice was equal parts shocked and authoritative, as if Frederick had suddenly lifted his shirt and showed her a bad case of ringworm, for which she just happened to have the right tube of cream in her purse. "We'll have to do something about that."

Unencumbered. Why did that sound so ominous to Annie, so bleak?

"Frederick is done with romance," Felicity said.

"You think I'm too old?" Frederick asked.

"Oh no, age has nothing to do with it. It's temperament, Frederick. And will." And she smiled a private smile, her lips pulled together in a cupid bow.

Miranda was saying that she had once gone paragliding on the beach in Wellfleet and suggested Frederick might treat his lack of romance by viewing the dunes from so many feet up; then she drifted off to a cluster of people she seemed to know.

"Why don't you just stay tonight?" Gwen said to Frederick. "With one of us," she added, glancing at Annie.

"I'm just a homebody, Gwennie. And I've got some kid house sitter I don't altogether trust this week — I have to get back."

"In that case, you better leave now," Gwen said. She gave Annie a challenging look. "Don't you think?"

Frederick also looked at Annie. "Maybe you'll come up sometime and see the place."

Evan said, "You could get three brownstones in Red Hook for that joint."

"Hardly that," Frederick said. "And you'll just have to buy your own brownstones in Red Hook or wait until I'm dead, because I have no intention of selling the house."

Evan shrugged. "I was just making an observation."

"Dad," Gwen said. She looked at her watch.

And, suddenly, Annie was alone.

She piled up the six or seven unsold books and thought wistfully of her own children. When would her boys start ordering her around, instead of the other way around?

She saw Frederick trotting back through the door toward her. He took both her hands, then kissed her on the cheek. Their noses bumped as he unexpectedly kissed her a second time on her other cheek.

"I had to thank you," he said. "I couldn't leave without thanking you."

"No, no, thank you for bringing in such a crowd."

"And don't worry about my driving back tonight," he added as he walked off. "I could do that drive in my sleep."

"That's not too reassuring," she said. "The sleep part."

"I'll call you," Frederick said, and he was gone.

Betty watched her daughter from the other side of the room. How serious she looked. Attractive, in a severe sort of way. Betty remembered giving Annie a sweater with sequins, just a few sequins, very tasteful, very chic. The look on Annie's face — it was so pure, such pure dislike. Betty smiled. It was like the time Annie had wanted a cowboy outfit and they gave her a pink cowgirl skirt. It had offended her, even at five. If she had known the word "garish" at that tender age, she would surely have used it. How Betty and Joseph had laughed that night in bed, embarrassed that they had so misread their daughter, amused by her sickened expression. And touched, too, for just as she had quickly hidden her dislike of the sequins years later, she had even as a tiny child tried to cover her disappointment as quickly as possible. Annie had such a good heart. It must be a burden to be so critical and so considerate at the same time, Betty thought. She was glad Annie seemed so taken with this Frederick Barrow person. He had a twinkle in his eye. Annie could use a twinkle. Poor Annie. She had always been such a grown-up little girl. It had been touching when she was a child, that worried little face watching her heedless, happy sister roar and sob and spin in circles, and it was touching still. Betty watched Miranda now, striding across the room to wrap her arms around Annie. Annie's expression softened. How lucky I am, thought Betty. She felt the damn tears gathering. I'm so lucky, she repeated to herself. But the tears never listened to her these days. Had they ever? It was hard to remember what she had been like before she was like this.