All this knowledge was, suddenly, too much for her. She could not read of June’s engagement, not right now, knowing what the future held for the girl, fictive though she was. She could hear the crunch of bones as the carriage wheel bore into Phil Bosinney.
Slowly, Lil closed the book, curled back on herself, and drew the covers up around her shoulders. She was tired again. Very tired. And her head ached. Why had she said that to Emily, earlier, that she should have married Young Jolyon instead of Soames? The metaphor was untrue, imprecise, sloppy. Since leaving Columbia, she’d let her mind go. She no longer thought about things with the rigor of a scholar. I want to be that person again, she thought. Tears, genuine ones, came to her eyes again, and she shook her head against the pillow, as if to ward them off. How can I be that person again? She closed her eyes and pressed her cool palms to them. Jolyon instead of Soames. Ridiculous. Irene had married Soames for money, not for love. The opposite of Lil, really, and a mistake of truly tragic proportions, as Galsworthy made all too clear. Though nothing, Lil supposed, compared to marrying for love, only to wake one morning and find it vanished. Or, she thought, to wake and find it had never existed.
fourteen
One morning in June, Sadie Peregrine wheeled her son, Jack, west on Grand Street to the new Seward Park playground, and took her accustomed seat under the shade of the young, vulnerable fig trees that shaded the southern rim of the main play area, with its thick rubber matting and developmentally appropriate jungle gym. At five that morning, Ed had kissed her good-bye, grabbed his orange gym bag, and headed to JFK. By nightfall he would be in Sarajevo, shooting his and Jonathan’s next film, about journalists who hunt down a war criminal. This time their little fledgling company—just he and Jonathan and a bunch of interns—was producing, in conjunction with Miramax. “Out!” said Jack, thrusting his body in the direction of the swings. “Out! Out!” To their left, a group of young mothers—well, mothers of roughly her own age—were engaged in hushed, fervid conversation, their eyes flicking ominously toward Sadie, their ringed hands clutching tall pink paper cups bearing the black, retro logo of the coffee shop just west of the park. Their toddlers waddled up the fat lacquered steps that led to the baby slide, gripping the shiny red handrails with small, chubby fingers, shrieking and squawking and shouting “Mama!” and “Mah-mee!” as they made their precarious ascent.
On the other side of the park, to Sadie’s right, a fleet of spring-mounted metal ducks wobbled atop shiny round bases, their long beaks set in expressions of exaggerated forbearance. In the three months she’d been coming to this park, she’d never seen a child go near them, perhaps because a clique of wool-clad Orthodox women had staked this area for their kaffeeklatsch. Today, as always, they chattered loudly in Yiddish, arms folded across their chests, eyes tracking their multitudinous broods as they ran in circles around the perimeter of the playground, just inside the edges of the safety mat, shrieking and squawking in their own, slightly more guttural style, their dark, smocked dresses and sweater vests oddly pristine and charmingly outmoded, the clothing of storybook children. Every so often, they reversed directions and shouted out the name of one of their numbers: Shlomo, Hudl, Chani, Tzipporah, Shoshana, Gitl, the names of Sadie’s Goldschlag ancestors, who had, like so many of their kind, lived in this neighborhood a hundred years prior, straight off the boat from Russia. They’d all left—for Brooklyn, the Bronx, Long Island. All but her childless aunt Minnie, her grandfather’s sister, who had married the neighborhood dentist and taught school at P.S. 110 on Cannon Street and bought her apartment in the union co-ops. The few remaining Goldschlags—cousins of her mothers, out on the Island—were still furious that she’d left the place to Sadie (“What does she need it for? With all that money from the father’s side?”), never mind that she and Rose had been Minnie’s most frequent—sometimes only—visitors in recent years, that they’d brought her uptown for lunch every Sunday.
“Mama, out,” said Jack.
“Okay, sweetie,” said Sadie, depositing her own pink cup of coffee on the bench. She knelt in front of him, doubled the knots on his red canvas sneakers, and unbuckled the stroller’s belt.
“Ga,” shouted Jack, taking her hand and pulling her past the toddler slide, toward the swings.
“You don’t want to go down the slide?” she asked, pausing.
“No. Gah.” This was, for some reason, his word for swing. It had taken Sadie several weeks to figure this out.
“You’re sure?” It worried her, just slightly, that he preferred to play with her—or with other adults, or alone—than with other children, not because she feared he was missing some sort of developmental milestone, but because she suspected, at times, that in her own quest for solitude, her own refusal or inability to make nice with the neighborhood mothers, she was, in some way, thwarting Jack’s burgeoning need for the company of kids his own age. And yet, the very term “playdate” made her want to slit her wrists. “Maude and Sophia and Ava look like they’re having a lot of fun.”
On cue, Maude’s and Sophia’s and Ava’s mothers muted their chatter and turned to look at Sadie and Jack. “Oh, hi,” called one, waving. “I didn’t see you there.”
Yes, you did, thought Sadie. “Hey,” she called, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“Minga,” said Jack, raising his arms to be picked up. “Mommy. Minga.” This word was still a mystery.
“Swing?”
“Minga!” Good enough, she thought, and hoisted him up onto her hip, then headed toward the empty row of black bucket swings, the eyes of the three mothers heavy on her. They were dressed alike, in jeans and T-shirts and Birkenstocks. One was fat and taciturn, with a low, ironic voice, and a frown permanently etched onto her chubby doll’s face. Another, freckled and painfully thin, radiated an anxious energy that set Sadie’s teeth on edge. The third woman—she who had deemed Sadie worthy of a hello—had the small, drooping eyes of a basset hound, a pink, robust complexion, and a tendency toward cheerful, exuberant gestures. Her name was Vicky. She’d moved into Sadie’s building at the same time as Sadie, just before Jack was born, found her henchwomen, and launched a neighborhood “mommies’ group,” which met each Wednesday afternoon at various pet-free, peanut-free apartments, to drink watery decaf, debate the merits of Huggies versus Pampers (versus the sleeper, Seventh Generation), and compare notes about the various tradespeople they employed to renovate and clean their apartments.
In the foggy months of Jack’s infancy—those final, sepia-toned weeks before September eleventh, and the wretched ones immediately following—Sadie had attended on occasion, thinking these women would become her friends. Instead, she found a scene reminiscent of junior high: the mothers discreetly sniping at one another and forging hard alliances from which Sadie was excluded. She had, perhaps, arrived too late to the party—their children were all a bit older than Jack—but more likely she was just constitutionally unfit for these sorts of situations. She tried gamely to keep up her end of the conversation—“Huggies seem to work better for Jack”—but she knew they could sense her irritation and boredom, she knew they considered her prickly and superior, and she knew that perhaps she was, and that she shouldn’t be, because they were all in this together, weren’t they? Still, she found herself sighing and rolling her eyes, as Vicky slyly denigrated a neighbor who’d placed her daughter in daycare at four months. And still she went to the meetings, bearing cake or cookies or flimsy plastic containers of strawberries, because she was, frankly, desperate for the company. They’re not so bad, she told herself. They’re nice. And they were, indeed, better than nothing, better than being completely and entirely alone with a mysterious infant and despairing for one’s city, one’s world, oneself. Ed had been in Toronto on the eleventh, had finally come home at the end of the week, not for lack of trying, but he was gone often after that, at the office late, or in L.A., or on location. Sadie insisting that she would be fine, fine, then bursting into tears when he called home. “I’m so tired,” she’d say. “I’m just so tired. But I’m okay.”