Riverside Park. Laura Wormer Van
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“This is Howie and Amanda we’re talking about. They both made mistakes the first time around and they knew exactly what they wanted when they got married. Which was each other. And the kids. They wouldn’t hurt those kids for anything and I think it’s rotten to even be talking about this!”
“I just worry,”Mrs. Goldblum said vaguely, preparing to rise from her chair.
Rosanne had forgotten to steer Mrs. G into the kitchen chair with arms on it so now Rosanne needed to help her get up without Mrs. G realizing that she was helping her get up. Mrs. G had become extremely irritable whenever she tried to help her and had thrown an absolute fit last year when Rosanne installed bars in her bathroom and along the hallways (although, Rosanne noticed, she started relying on them at once).
“At what time may we expect Jason?” Mrs. G asked, now on her feet and reaching for her walking stick. (That’s the way Mrs. G was—she didn’t use a cane like normal people; she used a walking stick, a skinny little black ebony stick with a silver handle that her granny or somebody used ten million years ago.)
“A little after eleven,” Rosanne said, glancing up at the clock. “They won’t close the kitchen until ten.”
“How we will miss him when he goes away to school,” Mrs. G said, moving toward her favorite seat in the living room to pick up her book. As was her habit she would take her book with her into the bedroom to read before going to sleep, but lately she had been falling asleep before getting to the book—or even turning off the light.
The phone rang and Rosanne picked it up and held it under her chin as she cleared the cups and saucers from the table. She’d have to wash them by hand because they were Wedgwood bone china that had belonged to some other ancient relative of Mrs. G’s. “Happy Thanksgiving,” Rosanne greeted whoever was calling.
Very carefully she put the dishes in the sink and held the phone with both hands, taking a quick look back over her shoulder. “Yeah, sure. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be right down. I know it’s hard, but you gotta do it. And I’ll go with you.” She swallowed. “Don’t think about it, we’ll just do it and get it over with. I’ll be right down.”
“Who was that?” Mrs. G asked, appearing in the doorway.
“Samantha Wyatt,” Rosanne said, replacing the phone in the cradle.
“Is she home from school?”
“Yeah. And I’m just going to run over with her to see her parents. To say Happy Thanksgiving. Leave the dishes in the sink and I’ll wash them when I get back.” She kissed Mrs. G on the cheek and headed for the front hall closet.
6
Sam Wyatt
“WHERE DOES SHE find these guys, in a catalog of the weird and the strange?” Sam Wyatt asked his wife.
“I think she met him through work somehow,” Harriet said quietly, putting the finishing touches on a second platter of hors d’oeuvres. They were on a second round because their youngest was two hours late and they were starving. They also had to entertain the latest boyfriend their older daughter had brought home to share their Thanksgiving meal.
Sam Wyatt’s eldest daughter, Althea, was thirty-one, black, Methodist and worked on Wall Street. The guy in the living room had gray hair, was white, and with a name like Donnelly was probably Catholic and had some kook job on Seventh Avenue. Sam always knew they would regret having sent Althea to that Muffy-Buffy school on the East Side for rich girls. Althea had grown up with so few black friends it was no wonder she dated white guys.
Admittedly, Sam and Harriet revolved in a somewhat rarified circle of New York. He may have started life as the youngest of six dirt-poor kids of an army sergeant who died young, but Sam had earned a college degree and today, at sixty-one, was a senior vice president of Electronika International, the second largest manufacturer of electronic office equipment in America. Harriet, whose skin was much lighter than Sam’s, began in the training program at Gardiner & Grayson book publishers and today was Vice President of Publicity, Marketing & Advertising.
“Be polite, Sam, that’s all I ask,” Harriet murmured, picking up the tray of hors d’oeuvres.
“Yeah, yeah.” He finished pouring the old white Catholic guy a second glass of wine. Sam hadn’t had a drink in over twenty-one years, which was a good thing since it had been under only that one condition that Harriet had allowed him back into her and Althea’s life. That was why there was an eleven year age difference between their daughters. Althea was from Round 1 of their marriage while Samantha was their AA baby, the child from Round 2 who benefitted most from her parents being in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.
Where the heck was Samantha? he wondered, looking at his watch. Traffic, he supposed. Harriet said after the scolding they gave Samantha about her last cell phone bill she would probably claim it had been “uneconomical” to call them from the road.
“Cliff was just remarking on the boat,” Harriet said when Sam came in, nodding in the direction of the framed picture of their sailboat.
Sam handed the old white guy his glass of wine.
“Thanks, Mr. Wyatt. Althea says you moor it in Manhattan for part of the year.”
“At the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin,” he confirmed. He sat down and took a sip of Crystal Lite. (It wasn’t half-bad compared to the other low-calorie crap Harriet was always trying to get him to drink.) “This time of year we keep it at our place in South Carolina.” One of the reasons they had been anxious to get the girls together was to tell them he had finally worked out early retirement with Electronika; he and Harriet could afford to stop working in the spring. They were planning to downsize from this apartment (thank God they had made the stretch to buy it) to a two bedroom and spend half the year in South Carolina and half up here in Manhattan.
Althea would be fine with not having them around half the year. After breezing through Columbia at their expense, Althea had gone off to Berkeley with her boyfriend at the time to get an MBA. With the degree (and without the boyfriend) Althea came back to New York and took a job on Wall Street, something she said she would do until she paid off her student loans from graduate school. She became an investment analyst, one of those brainy people who researched companies to see if the firm should underwrite a bond issue for them. If the analyst’s recommendations were correct, the firm often made a ton of money; if the analyst was wrong, though, the firm might still make some money up front but its reputation could take a hit which ended in long-term loss. The analyst responsible tended to vanish.
When Althea had told Sam she wished to stake her career on specializing in alternative energy, Sam’s heart had filled with dread. Leave it to whacked-out Berkeley to prepare his daughter to be the only person on Wall Street who would never make any money. But then, of course, the oil crunch came and a drawing of Althea’s face appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal as the high scorer in a suddenly enticing field. Her recommendation to underwrite a bond issue for a small company holding a patent that promised to revolutionize the production of hybrid engines was a grand slam, while earlier bond issues—in wind turbos, micro-turbines, corn refineries and municipal thermal-dynamic energy plants—were sent flying around the bases. Her latest venture was underwriting an outfit reopening abandoned sugar factories.
Althea was going to make partner in January. Last year Sam and Harriet had been agog to learn Althea’s salary was ninety thousand dollars—supplemented by a $650,000 bonus. To his daughter’s credit Althea gave over seventy-five thousand dollars a year away, paid something like three hundred thousand dollars in taxes (three hundred thousand dollars in taxes!) and moved into a two million dollar loft in SoHo.
This kind of money seemed insane to Sam and Harriet. And yet their own apartment, overlooking Riverside Park, had been appraised at over a million five. (They had bought it for two hundred and fifty thousand!)
But that was the nature of the great have and have-not divide of the new America, wasn’t it? The whole country seemed morally out of whack. You had everything or you had very little.