But Catherine was coming by to take a look at the progress she’d made on the wedding coat she was knitting—not enough, Anita had to admit—and then the two of them were going shopping on Via Veneto. She put on extra layers of blush and powder, trying to cover the puffiness in her face, but only succeeded in making herself look, well, old.
Everyone else was having the summer of their lives and Anita felt as though she was falling apart.
“Look who’s here,” said Marty, poking his head into the bedroom. He very much wanted to see Anita perk up again. “It’s Catherine.”
Their plan was to go to as many dress shops as necessary, one after the other, looking for the creamy, two-piece gown Anita envisioned underneath her knitted wedding coat. The garment, which she showed to Catherine, was still in its beginning stages, and Catherine didn’t quite know enough about patterns to understand what she was looking at. Still, the piece of the front that Anita had done looked intricate, with an almost rope-like raised design on the smooth background. The stitches were so tiny and uniform that the section looked like something made on a machine.
“You’re amazing,” said Catherine, before taking Anita by the hand and leading her out of the hotel and into the sunshine. They strolled awhile in comfortable silence before Catherine tried to broach the subject of the past few days; Marty had filled her in on the specifics.
“You look exhausted,” she said. “Why don’t we stop for an espresso?”
“I don’t need to be coddled, that’s for sure,” Anita replied. “I had a setback. A big one. These things happen, even to me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Catherine, slipping her arm through Anita’s. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Well, if not with you, then who?” said Anita. “Marty has listened long enough.”
Catherine couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride that Anita would consider her a confidante, like being picked first in gym class. She liked it, being someone’s go-to girl.
“My sister was a thief,” said Anita. “There. I caught her, my father had a heart attack when I told him, and she ran away. That’s the story. Cue to us walking down the street forty years later and the only thing I’ve heard from her is one blank postcard that arrives around the day she took off.”
“Your sister was a burglar?”
“No, a thief,” said Anita. “She stole, she didn’t break into people’s houses. She wasn’t a criminal, exactly. Just dishonest.”
Catherine was stumped. What should she ask next? Was the conversation done? Or did Anita want her to press?
“What did she steal?” she asked. In truth, she’d been looking forward to the day so she could run some of her own issues through the Anita-mometer, getting a reading on what she ought to do. Being the listener—and potential adviser—for a woman she’d always looked up to felt quite unusual.
She could see the tears building up in Anita’s eyes.
“Dignity,” said Anita. “Self-respect. Honor. Trust. She stole a lot of trust.”
“So she slept with Stan?” concluded Catherine, nodding her head in understanding.
“Why does it always come to men with you?” said Anita, looking at her with disapproval. “Sarah was like a little sister to Stanley. He wasn’t about to cheat on me and take her to bed. I swear you have a one-track mind! Sex is not the only thing that causes problems.”
“It can cause a whole hell of a lot of problems,” said Catherine, who then stopped walking and looked at Anita full on in the face. “The only other thing people fight about like this is money.”
Anita sighed. “Yes, that’s true.”
“Your sister Sarah stole money? From who? From you?”
“From my parents,” said Anita. “And I’m not just talking about sneaking twenties from my mother’s wallet. She was a bookkeeper in my father’s business, and she pulled some clever accounting.”
Catherine was blown away. She’d pulled lots of stunts in her own time, but embezzling from her parents?
“Sarah must be a horrible person,” she said now. “Why would you want to find her?”
“She wasn’t a career criminal,” said Anita. “She was a young girl who felt desperate. Don’t you see? I was her older sister and I should have helped her.”
Catherine knew enough to hold her tongue this time, and just let Anita explain.
“Sarah was in her early twenties,” said Anita. “She was a lot younger than I was. I had three growing boys in the late 1960s, busy running a home. I had a drawerful of kid gloves—the circle-pin era died hard with me.”
Catherine smiled; she could certainly imagine this elegant woman in white gloves and pillbox hats.
“But my sister wanted to do and try everything,” said Anita. “Even the tame things seemed shocking to us then.”
They waited for a stoplight to change, and Anita pointed to a teenage girl with curly dark hair strolling down the street with her friends. “That’s what she looked like,” she said. “Always smiling.”
“Until . . .” prompted Catherine.
“Until she brought home a boy who my parents didn’t approve of,” said Anita. “That’s what started things.”
“So I was right, though,” said Catherine. “This really does come down to men.”
“All things end up being about relationships,” said Anita. “We are driven by the need for power, or attention, or comfort.
“Sarah dated lots of boys, some not even Jewish, which was something my parents couldn’t abide,” she added. “And then, apparently, she settled on one fellow—his name was Patrick or Paul or something—and they got serious. I never even met the guy because she wasn’t about to bring him around. But then she came and told me: They’d been together.”
“Your sister had sex. So, okay,” said Catherine. “Wasn’t she an adult?”
“She was twenty-two,” said Anita. “Not so young, but not so sophisticated. She was very sheltered.”
“And you were shocked?”
“No, I wasn’t shocked,” said Anita. “But I was concerned. I didn’t approve. How long had she known him, for example?”
“And you told her she needed to break up with this guy, and she wouldn’t.”
“Not exactly,” said Anita. “They hadn’t used protection, she was worried, so on and so forth. On top of that, he’d been drafted.”
“Vietnam,” said Catherine.
“It was a terrible waste, a confusing time,” said Anita. “But if you were called, you served. That’s what my father thought. Stan, too.”
“And Sarah . . .”
“Their plan was to run, she told me,” said Anita. “Draft dodge. Go up to Canada, I guess.”
“And this is the part where you give her money on the sly, Anita,” urged Catherine. “Right?”
“This is what I always tell you about learning from bad decisions,” said Anita. “You suffer for them, but there can be a lesson somewhere. Because that’s not what I did. I berated her for letting everyone down. I told her she was a disappointment. I knew so much, with my happy marriage and my perfect children, that I wasn’t listening carefully enough. I didn’t ask the right questions.”
“And that’s when she took the money,” said Catherine. “So they could run away.”
“Over the next few weeks, yes,” said Anita. “She wrote checks made out to cash and forged my father’s signature. It was Stan who discovered it. My father was getting older by that point and he’d tried to balance the checkbook but couldn’t figure it out. Stan came over to help and got suspicious . . . ”
“And you turned her in to the police?”
“My own sister? Never,” said Anita. “Instead, I ran straight to my father and tattled the entire story. What shocks me now is how virtuous I felt about doing so! But the surprise was on me: my father’s blood pressure went so high that he ended up in the hospital with chest pains.”
“And then a heart attack?” They were close to a sidewalk café and Catherine raised an eyebrow,
questioning whether Anita needed a caffeine jolt. Anita nodded, gratefully, and followed her inside, sitting at a small round table and waiting for Catherine to bring over two espressos.
“Sarah came home in the middle of the night with her suitcase in hand, and there I was, staying up while my mother slept upstairs,” said Anita. “They’d given her Valium or whatnot so she could rest.”
“You confronted Sarah?”
“Confronted her? I threw a ton of bricks at her,” said Anita, clarifying when she saw Catherine’s look of alarm. “With words, my dear. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was a waste of a human being. I told her she’d killed our father, who was dying in a hospital bed.”
“Well, you kinda had a point there,” conceded Catherine.
“I told my own baby sister that she should get on a bus and get outta there and never come back,” said Anita. “‘You’re dead to me,’ I said to her. ‘From this moment on, I never had a sister.’ And all she did was cry. You see, she’d given the boy the money, and he took it. Leaving her behind. She wanted to come home.”
“Oh my God,” said Catherine. “She’d been used.”
“I don’t think he was even drafted, not from this vantage point,” said Anita. “He was a con artist, and she was a naïve girl. But I didn’t know that forty years ago. I was still a kid in so many ways myself.
“But what I did know, I told myself, was that Sarah was a thief who was destroying our family,” said Anita. “Well, I’ve had a lot of time to parse what took place since then, and I was hardly honorable.”
Anita grew quiet, gazing at her hands for a long while before looking up. “I yelled for a while and then I gave her money,” she said. “I up-ended the entire contents of my purse and threw it at her. ‘Is this what you want, you little thief?’ I said. I told her that our mother had said she never wanted to see her in our house again. Only that wasn’t true. I lied to her. But I believed I was in the right, you see? Protecting my parents.”
“I always figured you for perfect, Anita,” said Catherine as she finished off her drink. “That you don’t make the kind of big mistakes the rest of us do.”
“I wish I never had,” she said. “It wasn’t my place to tell her to leave. I took more power than was my right to have, and that made me a thief, as well.”
Anita undid the top button of her blouse; she felt hot, her cheeks burning at the memory.
“I followed my sister up the stairs, threw some of her clothes into a bag, and told her that I’d better not ever hear from her again: ‘Never forget that you are not welcome here,’” said Anita. “Those were my last words.”
“So was she pregnant?” asked Catherine. “’Cause that seems like a big elephant in the room.”
Anita started weeping. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
“And the postcards?”
“They’re from Sarah,” said Anita. “I know it. I’ve always known it. What is she saying? It’s anyone’s guess. For years, I told myself she wanted to let me know she was okay. That she’d forgiven me. In darker moments, I’ve wondered if she’s taunting me with the knowledge that I can’t find her even if I wanted to.”
“Anita, you’re human,” said Catherine, her tone thoughtful and more than a little surprised. “I always thought of you as knowing all the answers.”
“Oh, I know a lot now, dear, don’t be fooled,” said Anita, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “I’m a lot smarter now than I was then.”
“You saw Georgia in the park,” said Catherine now, as realization dawned. “You saw Georgia on the park bench, and she was your chance for redemption.”
“Yes,” admitted Anita. Relieved to say it out loud. “And I did a good job with her. I loved her like she was my own, and I listened. Whatever she had to say, I listened first and put my judgments aside.”
“Anita, I have something to tell you,” said Catherine. “Another postcard came. I misplaced it. And then I told myself I kept forgetting to tell you. But I just felt bad and I didn’t want to deal with your disapproval.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“At the room, yes,” said Catherine.
“Well, we’ll look at it sometime later, then,” said Anita. “I don’t think there’s any stone we’ve left unturned. I don’t think it’ll do much good.”
“There are flowers on the front,” said Catherine. “Camellias.”
“Not particularly helpful, I don’t think,” said Anita.
“I just realized if you sell the San Remo, then Sarah won’t know how to find you,” said Catherine suddenly.
“I know, dear,” said Anita. “I’ve thought of little else this summer. Apart from the wedding, of course. But sometimes there comes a moment when we just have to accept and move on. It’s not ideal, but it’s what is necessary sometimes. And I’ve decided it’s time for me to let Sarah go. I’m not going to look for her anymore.”
Several hours later, Anita was feeling a strong sense of relief. Other than Stan and Marty, she’d never shared her guilt over Sarah with anyone. But Catherine, who had made so many missteps of her own, understood. In fact, it seemed to Anita that Catherine was more relaxed around her than ever. She didn’t seem as nervous, as eager to please. And Anita liked the change.
“So, just in case you’re wondering, I’m not dating anyone,” said Catherine. Anita had tried on twelve dresses in seven different stores; Catherine hadn’t just played bystander and also looked at twenty outfits for herself. “Not even Marco.”
“Good thinking, dear,” said Anita, smoothing out some wrinkled silk.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because maybe you’re a tad focused on men,” said Anita. “A bit too much. Nathan told me about New York.”
“He did?”
“Yes,” said Anita. “And it’s fine, dear.”
“It is?”
“He’s a handsome man,” said Anita. “He told me you seemed to have a crush on him, often coming by the apartment when he was there.”
“I see,” said Catherine, starting to seethe. So what about her resolve to keep things to herself? Of course her natural instinct was to rat him out—she had to admire his sneaky strategy to test what his mother might, or might not, know—but who would that have helped? She thought of Anita and her story about Sarah. Giving her the real deal about Nathan wouldn’t make Catherine feel better, and it would have only been one more issue to pile on Anita. She didn’t need it.
“Maybe it was wishful thinking,” she told Anita instead. “You see, I was seeing someone in the city around that time, but it didn’t work out. So I think Nathan might have gotten things a bit mixed up.”
Anita seemed to brighten.
“Oh, wonderful, dear,” she said. “I hate to imagine you pining away for something you can’t have.”
A million sentences leaped into Catherine’s mind: Your son is a cheater. Your son is a liar. Your son is so mad at you he slept with me in your bed. But instead she just took a deep breath and let it go. Oh, she was a quick study today, she complimented herself.
“So Lucie told everyone’s favorite rock starlet, Isabella, that she could wear my Phoenix dress,” said Catherine, hoping to both change the subject and get a stamp of Anita approval to not loan out her dress.
“A bit presumptuous?” guessed Anita.
“Yes, exactly,” said Catherine. “I paid a lot of money for that gown.”
“I do recall,” said Anita, a smile playing on her lips. Her eyes were still puffy, but she was recovering nicely.
“Well, I can’t let her wear it,” said Catherine. “What if she ruins it?”
“You could treat it like those diamonds they loan out at the Oscars,” said Anita, standing up, only briefly, in a pair of white four-inch stilettos. “Send along Dakota and her new friend Roberto as bodyguards.”
“I don’t want to,” said Catherine.
“And I’m too self-confident to need to torture my feet like this,” said Anita, slipping off
the shoes. “Maybe we should get married barefoot, on the beach in Hawaii.”
“What about your wedding coat?”
“Light enough for all seasons,” said Anita matter-of-factly. “I like to be prepared. The only issue is that it’s taking me forever to knit it up.”
“So you don’t think I’m stupid for wanting to say no to Lucie and Isabella?” asked Catherine.
“If that’s what you want to do,” said Anita. “I mean, you display it in your store, so it’s not like you hide it away. And why would you want to share Georgia’s talents with the world? You should just keep them for yourself.”
Catherine threw back her head and laughed.
“Point taken, Anita,” she said. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
“Georgia would have loved to have her design in Vogue.” Anita was nudging but Catherine didn’t mind. “What about the second dress Georgia made for you?”
“The pink one?” said Catherine. “It’s also gorgeous, with that mandarin collar and the thigh-high slit, but I always objected to the fact that Georgia called it Powder Puff.”
Now it was Anita’s turn to laugh. “So rename it,” she said, softly touching Catherine’s cheek. “Change it to something more reflective of today’s Catherine. I think you should call it ‘Blossom.’”
twenty-nine
One cry was for snacks, another for wet diapers, a third for being bored, a fourth for being too hot or cold. The babies had what seemed like a million sounds, each distinct, and yet they communicated in a language that no one else understood quite as fluently as Darwin. Not even her mother. Or her mother-in-law, who’d come for the second round to help care for the twins and to register her disapproval of all the decisions Darwin was making. A one-two punch.
And yet, thought Darwin, she had this private victory of knowing her children better than anyone. From a purely academic standpoint, it was fascinating stuff: instinct and primal conditioning conquering all. From an emotional standpoint, it was deeply satisfying.
Darwin breastfed on demand—and Cady and Stanton certainly were demanding—but Mrs. Leung was unimpressed. An imposing woman in spite of her tiny appearance, Dan’s mother had given her daughter-in-law the option upon her marriage of calling her Mother or Mrs. Leung. Darwin chose the latter.