Fly Away Home Read online

  “Poor Sylvie,” said her mother. “You should call Jan for the keys.”

  “Keys?” said Sylvie.

  “To the Connecticut house,” Selma said, as if this was obvious. “I’ll come up and visit once you get settled. Remember what I said about teal.” Her mother paused, the way she had before closing arguments. “I love you, sweetie. Always. I’m here if you need me.”

  Sylvie ended the call, tucked her telephone into her purse, and stepped out of the stall. Clarissa stood back respectfully while Sylvie washed her hands and dried them in one of those high-tech blowers. Then, head bent as if buffeted by a heavy wind, she followed her assistant back out to the Town Car, where Derek hurried out to hold the door.

  In the backseat, she slipped off her shoes and then, with some wriggling, her panty hose, which had dug bright-red ridges into her hips. She yanked them over her thighs, her knees and ankles and kicked them onto the car floor, considering her husband, whom she’d loved for so long and thought she’d known so well. She remembered the first time Richard had brought her home to Harrisburg, to the tidy two-bedroom ranch-style house where he’d grown up and where his parents still lived. Richard’s father was bluff and hearty, proudly bald, with a barrel chest and a booming voice and an undying love for the Philadelphia Eagles. “How do you like my boy?” he asked, pounding Richard on his back (this back-thumping, Sylvie would come to learn, was what the male members of Richard’s family did in lieu of expressing emotion or conversing with each other). Cindy, Richard’s mother, was a small, timid woman who didn’t walk so much as scurry, and who barely said a word after her whispered “hello.” (Maybe, Sylvie thought, Richard Senior pounded her back, too, which was what had given her such a cringing, flinching manner.) She’d made a casserole for dinner, something with cream of mushroom soup and ground beef—Richard’s favorite, she’d murmured, scooping it onto thin china plates. She’d put Sylvie’s serving in front of her, then suddenly frozen, looking as stricken as if she’d served her son’s girlfriend a stewed human hand. “Oh, no … is that okay for you? Can you eat it?” she asked, her voice so soft Sylvie could barely hear it. “I can make something else … it’s no problem at all …” Sylvie, puzzled, had assured her that the casserole was fine, and told her, once she’d tasted it, that it was delicious, rich and filling, the perfect meal for a cold winter night.

  Later, tucked up against Richard in his old twin bed, with her toes touching his calves, she’d asked why Cindy had been worried. Richard said he guessed that it was because there was cheese in the dish, along with the beef, and that, even in a land bereft of Jews, his mother had enough of a rudimentary grasp of the principles of keeping kosher that she was worried Sylvie wouldn’t be able to eat meat with dairy.

  “We should write a book,” Sylvie said, fitting her body against his with her cheek against his chest and her hands cradling the back of his neck. “My First Jew.” He’d rubbed his fingertips gently against the top of her head.

  “I’m checking for horns,” he told her. She’d slipped one of her hands down the front of his pajama bottoms, whispering, “Me, too.” They’d made love for a long, slow time, neither of them making a sound until the very end. Richard, as usual, had fallen asleep almost immediately, but Sylvie lay awake, listening to Richard breathing beside her in this strange little house, as the wind whistled through the trees, thinking that she had never felt so safe, so content, so loved.

  In the back of the car, through the bottom of her purse, she could feel her telephone buzzing and burping. She pulled it out and looked at the screen, hoping, again, for Ceil. Instead, Richard’s face flashed into view—Richard in their bedroom, smiling at her as he stood in front of the blue-and-white wallpaper. His hair was mostly gray now, but his optimistic grin hadn’t changed at all since she’d first met him. Sylvie punched IGNORE. She wasn’t ready for that conversation. Not now. Not yet.

  Donor-funded junkets to beach resorts, the newscaster had said. She remembered a trip Richard had taken to Martha’s Vineyard, a three-day weekend that spring, a Democratic National Convention retreat where current congressmen could look over the party’s new faces and decide who had a future, who would get their endorsement and their time during the coming campaign season. Richard himself had been coronated at just such an event, that one at the South Carolina shore. Sylvie would have tagged along, but it was Ceil’s birthday and they’d made plans to go to the Museum of Modern Art and a spa after, and a new sushi place after that. Richard had dug his golf clubs out of the storage unit in their building’s basement, and Sylvie had tucked a bottle of sunscreen into his suitcase because Richard always forgot. He’d come home on Monday afternoon, the top of his head bright red the way she knew it would be (the next day, it would start to flake and peel, and she’d remind him to exfoliate in the shower and moisturize when he was done). When he’d kissed her, before dropping his suitcase off in the bedroom for her to unpack, she hadn’t felt like anything was off, or wrong, even though it seemed that he’d been sharing his bed with his aide for those three nights.

  Sylvie yanked at her waistband, wishing she could take off the too-tight skirt, feeling, again, like she couldn’t breathe. Her phone was buzzing and beeping and belching. She glanced at the screen. Richard, again. She ignored it, thinking about e-mails and photographs, wondering how bad this could get. Numbness was creeping over her body, freezing her toes and her fingertips, turning her legs and arms into blocks of wood. Her brain, however, was no longer clamped shut. It was clicking and humming, whirling and turning, busily dredging up scenes and sound bites from political scandals both recent and long past. There was the senator who’d been busted in an airport men’s room after soliciting sex with strangers (male strangers, and how Sylvie’s heart had broken for his poor wife, standing beside him as he insisted that it was all a misunderstanding, that he wasn’t really gay!). There was the governor whose aides had said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when in reality he was visiting a ladyfriend in Argentina. That one had been a big topic around her house for weeks. “Do you realize,” she’d told Richard, sitting cross-legged in the armchair of his office, “that I’ll never get to be anyone’s Argentinian mystery woman? Do you understand what a tragedy this is?” Richard had kissed her, saying, “Don’t be so sure. You’ve still got time.”

  Was he cheating on her then? Had the joke been on her, the gullible, guileless wife who was just as much a dupe as poor Jenny Sanford down in South Carolina? Her hands tightened into fists as her telephone sounded. Richard again. She clicked IGNORE, and then, squinting at the tiny screen, she accessed the Internet and made her way to the most recent news story, which she read with one eye open and one at half-mast. Sources say the senator took his mistress on a taxpayer-funded long weekend in the Bahamas, where they shared lunches of fresh crab salad and tropical fruit and played backgammon in a beachfront cabana.

  Sources. She wondered about that—a former aide, a disgruntled ex-staffer, someone who’d been fired or not promoted fast enough? She moaned out loud—but softly, so that Clarissa and Derek wouldn’t hear her—and clicked through the story until she found a picture of the woman, Joelle. She stared for a long moment, looking at the tiny image, wondering what Richard saw in this other woman, an ordinary woman, pleasant-looking enough, a hopeful, happy expression as she gazed up at Richard. What struck her immediately was the resemblance. When she and Richard had met, that was how she’d looked: big-busted, heavy-hipped. Back then, she’d favored necklaces of colorful beads that she bought on street corners in New York, and cheap, dangly earrings that usually ended up tangled in her hair. She’d drunk wine from bottles with screw-tops, and she’d been a social smoker of cigarettes and an occasional smoker of pot. She’d had a closet full of black tights and bright skirts, fringed scarves, tunics and peasant blouses to wear with them. She’d pull her curls off her face and twist them in a knot skewered with a pencil. Wild child, Richard had called her, cupping her head and pulling her into a kiss.

  She
and Richard had met in law school. There were twenty-three women in their class of one hundred and seventy, a group that included a future first lady (her husband, the future president, had been a year behind them). Among her classmates, Sylvie had been, if not royalty, then at least someone with a reputation, the daughter of Judge Selma Serfer, who’d once taught at Yale and who returned each year to lecture the 3-L’s on gender and the law. Richard had a reputation, too. He’d played football back in Harrisburg and Penn State, and was tall and well muscled, with a shock of unruly brown hair. He was obviously smart—anyone at Yale would have to be. But Richard did not cultivate the air of bemused indifference that most of the other boys worked hard to achieve. In class, while they leaned back in their chairs, legs stretched presumptuously in the aisles, cuffs unbuttoned and frayed, he’d be bent over his notebook, scribbling frantically as if intent on getting every word down, his jacket hung neatly on the back of his chair and his plaid shirt buttoned to the throat. When the professors asked for volunteers, his hand shot up, his sleeves exposing an inch or two of knobby white wrist … but when he talked, his voice was low, and warm, and persuasive. He was never flustered, never unprepared, and seemed to relish the attention that Sylvie dreaded, and which she constantly received.

  The professors would always find her, homing in on her face amidst the rows of students. They’d make a point of reading her name out loud, savoring the syllables. “Ms. Serfer,” they would say, teeth buzzing over the “Mzz.” “Any insight you can offer us on Griswold v. Connecticut?” She’d answer correctly. Sometimes she’d even get a little sassy. Asked if she’d read a certain opinion, she’d say, “Well, my mother wrote it,” and pause before adding, “so, no.”

  In their first year of law school, Sylvie had dated a few of those cool, indifferent boys. Neil was a New Yorker whose parents knew hers, who’d been at Columbia while she was at Barnard and who seemed more interested, Sylvie ultimately decided, in a merger than a romance. (When Neil had shown up at their ten-year reunion with a male ballet dancer he’d introduced as his partner, she hadn’t been entirely surprised.) Then there was Evan, who had pale skin and a beautifully molded throat, who’d dressed so handsomely and had such a nice way about him that it took her months to notice that he didn’t seem as interested in the specifics of Sylvie’s life as he did in whether her father might be in need of new in-house counsel.

  Richard had arrived in New Haven with a girlfriend, a little blond thing who’d followed him from Penn State and was enrolled in Yale’s School of Nursing. Sylvie would see the two of them around campus, Richard bouncing on the balls of his feet as he walked, gesturing as he spoke, and the little blonde gazing up at him from his side. Then, at some point, the little blonde disappeared.

  She and Richard had been in classes together, in the library together, probably even at parties together, but they didn’t speak for the first time until a funeral in December of their second year in law school. One of their classmates, a thin, intense dark-eyed boy named Leonard King, had fallen off a fourth-story roof late one night. (“Fallen off” was the official version, the one printed in the Yale Daily News and the New Haven Register, which referred to his death as a “tragic accident.” Among his classmates, Leonard’s death was widely assumed to have been suicide.)

  All of the 2-L’s attended a memorial service in the campus chapel. Leonard’s parents had wept distressingly in the front row, his mother tottering on her heels before her husband and a son who was a younger, bespectacled version of Len wrapped their arms around her and followed Leonard’s coffin out the door. Sylvie, in a black lace-trimmed skirt and a thin blouse several shades lighter, the most appropriate clothes she’d been able to find, had been shivering, picking her way across the slush and ice when suddenly Richard was beside her. “Let me give you a hand,” he said. He reached for her backpack.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. Richard’s thin-soled dress shoes slid on a patch of ice and the next thing she knew, he was flat on his ass beside her.

  “Ow,” he said, startled. “Ow, shit!” His legs were splayed out in front of him, his socks drooping, his pants legs riding up, exposing his hairy calves. She grabbed his hand to pull him upright but couldn’t get enough purchase with her silly high-heeled shoes, so she wound up on top of him, her chest pressed against his, both of them on the wintry, wet ground, laughing until tears ran from her eyes. She knew it was ridiculous, and that poor Richard’s pants were soaked and probably ruined, but the day had been so terrible, and it felt good to laugh.

  Richard finally got to his feet, then pulled Sylvie upright. “You okay?” he asked, and she nodded, her cheeks flushed from the cold and, maybe, from the feeling of his solid chest against hers.

  He picked up her backpack, and they started walking together back toward the campus. “I have to say,” he told her, “this wasn’t how I thought our first conversation would go.”

  She looked at him sideways. He’d imagined a conversation they might have? That was pleasant to consider.

  “You’re Selma Serfer’s daughter, right?”

  She nodded, feeling less pleased. None of her other fellow students would ever bring up Selma, and all of them took pains to act surprised when Sylvie mentioned her mother, as if they were learning new information, when, of course, they all knew exactly who Sylvie was and to whom she was related.

  “Watch your step,” he said, pointing out an iced-over puddle. “Learn from my mistakes.” Once they were past it, he said, “I’ll bet it was something, growing up with a mother like that.”

  “Honestly, I just wish she was a better cook.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them—it was a horrible thing to say, an antifeminist thing to say—but Richard had just nodded.

  “It’s a choice, right? Preeminent legal mind of her generation or makes a good potpie. And speaking of pot … pie …” He waited for her to laugh, then said, “My housemates and I are having a party Friday night.”

  Sylvie lifted an eyebrow—as an undergraduate, she’d practiced this maneuver in the mirror until she could raise her left eyebrow independently, which served her well in class. “Oh, yeah?”

  He rattled off his address. “Nine o’clock or so. You wanna come?”

  She wanted. Later, when she did sit-downs with the women’s magazines, which would run an eight-hundred-word profile of the senator’s wife alongside a head shot and her recipe for chewy molasses cookies, she would tell the story differently. She’d say that she and Richard had met in the library, instead of on their way back from a funeral, which sounded grim, like it foreshadowed tragedy. She never told anyone how Richard had fallen, and how she’d gotten her first good look at her husband-to-be with his bottom soaking in an iced-over puddle. She didn’t mention that the first meeting had included a discussion of the Honorable Selma, or that their first real date had been at what turned out to be a typical beer-soaked, dope-smoky law school bash.

  Richard lived in a rambling house with a half-rotted porch jutting off its front wall and a decaying couch beside the front door. Everything in the kitchen, every glass and plate and piece of cutlery, even the blender in which someone’s girlfriend was frothing margaritas, was coated with a thin film of grime.

  She arrived at the party just after ten o’clock. Richard was in the kitchen, waiting for her, which made her feel giddy, as if she’d been drinking champagne. Taking her hand, he led her down a narrow hallway into his little bedroom, which was, surprisingly, neat as a monk’s cell. “Quieter in here,” he called over the music. Sylvie looked around. There was an old Kennedy/Johnson campaign poster over the desk, an American flag on the opposite wall, and Janis Joplin on the stereo. The bed was neatly made, with a worn red-and-green plaid comforter tucked in tightly at its corners. Sylvie sat at the edge of the bed with her legs crossed. She bet herself that this was Richard’s boyhood bedspread, that he’d brought it with him from home to college and then on to New Haven. She bet, too, that his parents hadn’t replaced it; t
hat somewhere in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, there was a bed with just a sheet on it, maybe piled high with laundry, or clothes meant to be given away, but bare underneath, in a house that was very different from her parents’ apartment on the Upper West Side, and her own pink-and-white bedroom, where the rolltop desk and canopied bed still stood, waiting for her to come home.

  “Get you something?” Richard’s face was flushed, from his jawline down the length of his throat, and she could smell him—sweat and soap and shampoo and liquor. In his hand was a tumbler of something amber on ice—a seven-and-seven, she’d later learn, Seagram’s whiskey and 7-Up. Most of the men she knew ordered whiskey, straight up, or what she’d come to think of as the beer of the proletariat—Pabst or Schlitz or Old Bohemian—but Richard liked his sweet drink and refused to change. It was one of the first things she admired about him.

  “I’ll have what you’re having,” she said.

  When the bedroom door opened she got a blast of heat and noise from the party. Janis had been replaced by the Doors. When Richard came back, he handed her a drink, then sat on the bed beside her. “So,” he said. “Sylvie Serfer.” With one fingertip he traced the edge of her neckline, an embroidered peasant blouse that she’d pulled on over a denim skirt, tights, and a pair of fringed suede boots three sizes too big that she’d bought at a thrift shop and worn with three pairs of socks. “I like your shirt.”

  “Thanks.” She pulled back a bit, alarmed at the unexpected intimacy; alarmed even more at how much she liked it. She wanted Richard Woodruff to press his palm against the skin the shirt left bare, to push her back on the bed and kiss her. She could smell the liquor coming off him. His eyes were bright and his gestures a little too expansive as he stood up and did an imitation—startlingly apt and a little cruel—of their Contracts professor, who had a body shaped like a bowling pin and wore shirts that exposed a simian froth of chest hair.