Out in the hospital atrium, I sat down heavily at one of the small tables. Without a word, the young aide brought me what I’d been having the last few days, a pot of chamomile tea and a pumpkin scone. The twins were perambulating wildly beneath my rib cage as though they, too, were undone and enraged. I took off my shoes, and when I tried to get up to leave, to go somewhere, anywhere, I found that I couldn’t get them back on my swollen feet, and I began to cry. Wordlessly the aide returned with a box of tissues and a stack of magazines. Perhaps she did not realize that one of them, one of the older ones, had my sister’s picture on the cover. “Meghan!” it said. “Fit and nearing 50!” The pianist was playing what seemed to be an endless medley of New York songs. Taking the A train, in a New York state of mind. After about a half hour, he wound up with a rendition of “New York, New York.” If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
“I hate this song,” Irving said, falling into the chair opposite me. “Sweetheart?” he called to the hospital aide. “Sweetheart, is there any way you could get a tired guy a beer? I don’t do the tea thing, and I’m really running on empty here.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t serve alcohol in the hospital.”
“Yeah, I guess I figured that. I just thought maybe an exception could be made.” He looked at me looking hard at him and added, “I think my pal here could use a drink, too.”
“I could use an explanation.”
“Not from me. I got dragged into this thing at the last minute. I still have to get a fill from the number one participant, who is around here somewhere. I’m just the guy who called the cops and kept things cool. But that was not my show.”
“Yeah, I know exactly whose show it was. Show is exactly the right word for it.”
Irving pulled a cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it between his thumb and finger. “I think you’re being hasty about this. I’m the last guy who wants your average civilian involved in something like that, and I’m going to rip Tequila the next time I see her about what she did. But you know as well as I do that your sister might have actually helped keep things under control there. Not great for the department, because one of the city columnists will be pounding the drum about how one little white woman could keep things cool when the cops usually can’t. But bottom line, she went in, she came out with the guy, we got the guy, she walked away, no one hurt. Finito.”
“Oh please. Finito? On what planet? She’ll be all over the news for the next two weeks.”
“If anyone can deal with that, she can.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean she used this. She used this to get herself back on the map. And you helped her. You helped her.”
Irving looked at me, the cigar pivoting in his hand. The aide brought him a flowered teapot and a matching cup. He waved her away, but she put it down and winked. Irving looked inside the pot and smiled. I could smell the beer from where I sat. He poured from the teapot into the cup and sipped, then gulped.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he called across the room.
“You’re not going to say anything to me?”
“I’m trying to modulate my temper before I do. So let me start at the beginning. You have a sister. She’s two people. She’s that person that everyone thinks they know. They make up stuff about her, in their own heads and in the papers, and some of it is right on the money and most of it is crap. Then she’s the person she really is, whatever that means. And she probably figures there’s nobody who knows who that is except your aunt, maybe, and you. It turns out that even her husband can’t tell the difference. And right now it seems like you can’t, either. You’re making the kind of judgment about what happened that reporters will make, and gossip columnists, and all those morons your sister invites over for dinner, the ones that eat her little bitty lamb chops and then trash her behind her back. And I gotta say, from where I’m sitting, the idea that you’re in that camp is pretty heinous.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Yeah, I do. You’re the one who doesn’t. You can’t see straight when she’s around. What’s your problem, that if she winds up right back where she started from then so will you? That’s a joke. Everything’s changed. She crashed and burned, and you stood up. You can’t go back, even if you wanted to, and Jesus, it would be sad if you wanted to. You can’t go back because you’re a different person and so is she. Look at her. It’s gone, whatever you call it, that idea she had that she was untouchable. That way of looking like she had the world by the tail. And look at yourself. Poor little Bridget? Give me a break. She was as phony as big bad Meghan was. Stop playing cartoons in your head. Stop believing what you see on TV. Your sister is weak and broken and sad. And she needs somebody to see her that way, to let her be that way in one little corner of the world. And there’s nobody available except you. You hear me? You think you owe her? Well, payback time is here.”
“You’re taking her side?”
Irving shook his head hard, like he was trying to shake something loose. He leaned back in the chair and sighed. “I just don’t get it. I just don’t get it. You’re so damn smart about everybody else. And then you get inside your own head and you wander around like you’re in the woods without a compass.”
“You’re taking her side. You are. I can’t believe it.”
“There are no sides. You love somebody and you help them, and you give them a break. And they do things you don’t like but you love them so you go along.”
“Like a deal.”
Irving shook his head. “If it’s like a deal, you’re screwed,” he said. “A deal means you’re expecting something back. What I’m talking about is just taking it as it comes.”
“I’m not sure I can forgive her.”
“For what?”
“For that dog-and-pony show she just put on. I just don’t see it the way you do. I still think she was trying to rehabilitate her reputation out there.”
“Bridget, let me tell you something. And I want you to listen to this, because I’m saying it out of respect. You would have done the same goddamn thing.”
“I wouldn’t have had the cameras there.”
Irving sighed again. “Forget the cameras. Who cares? It’s not whether people are watching when you do it. It’s what you do. People will see what they want. It’s only the ones inside who know the truth. I’ve told you a million times: Don’t ever make the mistake of confusing a good story and the truth.”
“I’m still trying to figure out which this was.”
“Ah,” said Irving, finishing the last inch of beer from the flowered pot. “This was one of those rare cases that was both at the same time.”
I SEE CLEARLY now in retrospect that Irving was right. He can be irritating that way, although he is also good about admitting his own errors of judgment. A month after the twins were born he was walking one of them across the bedroom floor just before dawn when I heard him say, “Okay, I admit it. I was totally wrong about this. Totally.” On the other hand, I think he said it because he thought I was asleep.
Of course, I was right about my sister, too. Rehabilitation was exactly what happened, although the shape of it was clear only as the years went by. To her credit, Meghan handled the aftermath of the afternoon at the Tubman houses flawlessly, which I suppose should have come as no surprise. She didn’t do interviews; the requests from reporters piled up beside the phone, although Mercedes told them that Miss Fitzmaurice would not be calling back. The only messages she returned, when she came home from the hospital to sleep for an hour or two, were those from old friends. She didn’t start going out to lunch with network executives until Leo had left the hospital and gone to the rehabilitation facility, where the staff began the work of teaching him to negotiate the world from a wheelchair.
The rehab hospital was an hour north of the city, its turreted stone buildings set along wide paths in the middle of the woods. Even the local cabdrivers who took me from the train station had a hard time finding it. But dozens of people
came to see Leo during the months that he was there. His friends from Biltmore drove from the north and the south, from Vassar and Princeton and Colgate and Yale. A few of them were discomfited by the sight of Leo Grater, lacrosse player, track-and-field hurdler, long-legged soccer ace, sitting in the motorized chair, his calves merely filler within the legs of his pants. But most of them gave him one afternoon to vent and then went on as before. There were a couple of weeks after Meghan showed him the tape of Marvin’s surrender when Leo was sullen and silent, even with me. The guy took a plea and still got the maximum, not for assault but for attempted murder. He writes Leo once a month every month, on the anniversary of the day he shot him.
One afternoon we were sitting in the sunroom overlooking a small pond, and I asked Leo whether he had dreamed during that time in the hospital, those weeks when the doctors kept him chemically unconscious to give him time to heal. He nodded. His hair had grown in darker, less wavy, and of course he looked older now. “I dreamed I was running,” he said. That was the only time I cried in front of him. “Let it go, Bridey,” he muttered.
His friends came down from Amherst, too, and some of the kids from the Bronx took the train up with their mothers, who sat uncomfortably in the waiting room, hoping no one blamed them for what had happened. Leo played chess with the kids in the sunroom, and he flexed his biceps to show them how strong he’d gotten. Delon came, too. “I’m sorry someone shot you with a gun,” he said solemnly, and Leo said, “I’m sorry, too.” Then he put Delon on his lap and took him for a ride down one of the outdoor pathways, the little boy clinging to the handrails of the chair with that same terrified look of joy he’d had when Leo put him on his shoulders and exhibited him for the cop and the caseworker that afternoon so long ago.
Princess Margaret visited almost every Saturday. Often she hitched a ride with one of Leo’s friends. She went to Amherst, too. They gave her the biggest grant they had to offer, a free ride for college and an additional three-year scholarship endowed by an alumna for postgraduate work. Tequila had decided that she would be a lawyer.
Leo transferred to Columbia after he finished rehab. He called it the crip-friendly Ivy, but I suspect he wanted to be close to the therapist he had found. She was a fifty-year-old Irish-American woman, slender and self-contained, a marathon runner with the most muscled calves I had ever seen. I’d laughed when I went in to talk to her for the first time.
“And he chose you out of all the shrinks in town,” I’d said.
“Occasionally the human psyche is mysterious,” she’d replied in a light voice. “But not often.”
She’d come to Leo’s graduation as his guest, and so had Margaret and Tequila, and Irving, of course, and Aunt Maureen, who had moved into an assisted living facility, and Evan and his wife, Juliet, and their daughter, who was six months old and slept through the ceremony in her stroller, and Edward Prevaricator, who had married my sister the year before. Each graduate was supposed to have only four tickets to Class Day, but Edward had become a trustee of the university, and we had as many tickets as we liked. We were already sitting in a special section near the stage when he and Meghan arrived, and like a cornfield in an August breeze, the crowd began to make that faint repetitive whispering noise I know so well, that resolved itself into spoken words only if you listened closely, or knew in advance what they would be saying: There she is. There she is. Meghan Fitzmaurice. That day I remembered what she had said to me one afternoon down by the blue water in Jamaica about how she felt in exile: “The past seems improbable, the present infinite.”
“What about the future?” I’d asked.
“What future?” she had replied.
“Leo almost missed the procession,” she whispered to me as she took her seat between Irving and Edward. “He and his friends were carrying on upstairs. I think most of them are already drunk. And God knows what they’re wearing under their robes. I think one of them is naked.”
“Really naked?” my son said, his eyes enormous.
His sister was at the end of the row on Margaret’s lap, her thumb stuck firmly in her mouth, her free hand playing with a curl that hung down on her forehead. Perhaps that was why Leo had wanted to go to school in New York City, too, because of Max and Isabelle. Max and Isabelle Fitzmaurice Lefkowitz. “Aw, jeez,” Irving had said. “They sound like a law firm.”
“Your uncle Leo is not a good boy, Max,” Meghan whispered.
“He’s not a boy,” Max said, pursing his lips. “He’s a man.”
And it was so. As his name was called, he steered himself effortlessly up the ramp to the platform, and from the other students there was a great deep shout. He waved, and his classmates began to chant “Le-o, Le-o,” and Max and Isabelle picked it up, too. Evan’s daughter rose from the stroller and let out a cry at the noise, then as quickly slumped down and fell back to sleep, and Evan reached over and put his hand on Meghan’s. Her eyes were full of tears. There was a flash, and I knew someone, perhaps just another parent, perhaps a press photographer at the edges of the crowd, had taken her picture. Three helicopters circled overhead, above the shaded amphitheater the limestone buildings of the university created as they leaned toward the center lawn. Watching, watching, although this time watching not us but the pageantry below. New York is a city in which everyone is always watching, in which I suppose everyone feels recognized. When Irving and I had moved into the bigger apartment on Ninety-seventh Street the month after the twins were born, a woman stopped me on the stoop as I carried the last of the lamps out of the old place. “Congratulations!” she said, a palpable thrill in her voice, and I looked at her, confused, and suddenly saw that she was the woman who lived across the backyard, with the son, now gone to college, and the daughter, who looked a year or two from leaving. I had watched her life from across a hundred feet of atmosphere, and it turned out she had watched mine, too. We embraced.
“Didn’t it creep you out that she’d been watching you?” Meghan said when we were having lunch with our aunt, and then was vaguely indignant as the two of us hooted with raucous laughter.
My sister is for all intents and purposes herself again, which is to say that everyone knows who she is and thinks well of her. Slowly but surely over the last four years, it became clear that Meghan Fitzmaurice, the hard-as-flint morning news cookie who’d filthy-mouthed a guest, had been transmuted into Meghan Fitzmaurice, the devoted mother who walked her son’s assailant into the arms of the police and sat by her son’s bedside and her son’s wheelchair as he recovered. In each successive story the Greenstreet interview was pushed lower as the standoff at the projects grew larger. The audience didn’t realize until the opportunity presented itself that what Meghan Fitzmaurice needed to make her perfect was a whiff of tragedy and a measure of comeuppance.
She has a different job and a different audience now, too. She does a show called Day’s End that runs for a half hour each night at 11:30. She and a guest in conversation, usually about something significant: the secretary of state on the Middle East, the president of Harvard on the future of higher education. No interviews with actresses unless the actresses are smart and serious and willing to be crossed. Meghan had not lost that, that ability to say, “Oh, come on. Didn’t you really take on this role for the money, pure and simple?” People say they find it refreshing.
One night Irving and I were watching, and he said thoughtfully, “Nobody maintains the fiction better.” At first I thought it was a criticism and I was a little surprised, since Meghan has been so devoted to the twins and Irving has come to like her more for it. But then I realized that he had gotten to the heart of the thing, not only for her, but for all of us. Meghan once managed to convince people that what they were seeing was a conversation on a couch between two people, two people who happened to be America’s best-known TV personality and a popular actress, or an esteemed writer, or a distinguished doctor, or sometimes just an average citizen, jittery and glassy-eyed, caught in an extraordinary situation and rewarded by fou
r minutes on morning television. There was a coffee table and a wall of books and a window with a view, although the view was a photograph wallpapered onto a backdrop and the books had never been read and the living room was in the middle of a vast hangar of a place filled with technical people and assistants and producers.
Now Meghan convinces people that she is merely sitting at a table deconstructing the great issues of the day, although most of them have been deconstructed in advance by the production staff and the questions committed to memory before the red light goes on. But still the fiction is maintained, of spontaneity, of genuine engagement, of a conversation at a table empty of everything but water glasses, paper, and pencils.
Isn’t that what we all do, really? Irving works to maintain the fiction that the New York City Police Department has matters always in hand, although no one knows better than he that that is illusory. I once worked to maintain the fiction that the women I helped would find homes, find work, find the future palatable if not ideal, when I knew that that was often not remotely true. And now that I am the deputy commissioner for homeless services—Edward is a college friend of the mayor’s, and Irving has served him well—I maintain the fiction that we will get people off the streets and into shelters, if not apartments. Occasionally we even manage to do so.
Last winter, after New York had had three nights when the temperature had fallen below ten degrees, Meghan decided to do a half hour on the homeless. “Do you want to come on?” she said and then answered herself, “Too weird, huh?” The lines are brighter now. She has not done a program about paralysis, or the rights of the disabled, or gun violence. Marvin writes to her from prison, too, but she does not read the letters. Leo does not read the ones he receives, but he keeps them, unopened, in a drawer in the small apartment with the widened doorways he has uptown. He is going to Columbia’s journalism school in the fall, and if I had to guess, I would guess he knows that a good story lies between the lines of those letters. “I am my mother’s son,” he said to me one day when we were discussing his future. And he is. He is harder, harsher, tougher. He is a person with something to prove now. I sometimes wonder where my sweet soft Leo went, and then Max and Isabelle run into the room and swing off his powerfully muscled arms, and for just a little while he is there.