The Sixteenth of June Page 8

  Hannah Portman had never set foot in Pine Grove before living there. She was shown a brochure; her tour of the place had been on move-in day. Had it felt like this? As if the person assuring you your doubts were for nothing didn’t know you at all?

  It is difficult to heed the warning bells. How much easier to just go along and agree. To watch the trajectory of the ball long ago set in motion and see where it will land, as though you are not the product of its outcome. To watch as though you have no hand in your own life. As though the only words we have available to us were written long ago in a blue book. As though we cannot make our own stories, decide our own fates.

  Nora has already given up auditions. Occasionally the audience at Manning catches a glimpse of her soaring vocals. They freeze, startled, before whooping and clapping. Stephen has come to hate these moments. That’s a world-class voice, he wants to yell. Meanwhile, Leo beams, proud of his girl. It isn’t Leo’s fault. He’s always been clear about what he wants. No one can accuse him of disguising his desires. But Stephen has come to understand the lure of complacency. And there Leo is, encouraging Nora to settle down. Encouraging her to settle.

  It all starts with a choice. “A girl, a girl. What did I know?” his grandmother used to say. Regret was a luxury. She didn’t have time to question her decisions. It was Poland. It was 1939. She and her new husband fled, embracing each other instead of their doubts.

  His grandfather came to America first, securing them a house. God, Stephen thinks. Did she ever pick out a place of her own? That house. Then the nursing home. Probably the coffin. Did she ever have a say?

  Once it starts, it’s hard to choose differently. His grandmother had made a decision, a choice that probably felt harmless at the time. A kiss, nothing more, a girl wanting to see how it felt. Hannah Portman had stepped up and closed her eyes, perhaps not so much choosing as giving in.

  He looks at Nora beside him. It’s not the future we should fear, he wants to tell her. It’s ourselves.

  It almost makes him laugh. I too, he thinks. I too am a reluctant bride.

  Seven

  At least the wind’s died down,” June observes. “I was worried at the cemetery I’d come undone!”

  Nora takes in June’s blond helmet, streaked with highlights of ash and honey. That chignon could probably survive gale-force winds. June tilts the Escalade’s side mirror to survey herself while Leo winces.

  The family had converged around the SUV. “There you are,” Leo said lightly, coming over to Nora’s side of the car. She ducked to put her shoes back on, telling herself there was no reason to feel guilty. It wasn’t as if she and Stephen had been making out in the backseat. When she straightened, Leo gave her an inquisitorial look. Any luck? his eyes asked. Nora raised her mouth to his ear. “I tried the dental tools. Even the bamboo splinters. But nothing! He’s not talking.”

  “We have to remember to save the paper,” June adds.

  “For the obituary?” Stephen asks. “It was in yesterday’s Inquirer. I already clipped it.”

  Nora had spotted it, too, scanning the paper over breakfast. There was Hannah Portman’s name, the serifed font skeletal and scythe-wielding. Nora’s eyes lingered on it, thinking how strange it was to have a person’s life reduced to a few words.

  “No, I mean for the feature.” June unfastens her clutch. “We talked to Tom.”

  “The feature?” Stephen repeats.

  “Tom?” Leo inquires.

  June brings out a tube of lipstick. YSL, the letters say, gleaming in gold script.

  “Thursday was just the obit,” Michael explains. “This will be a longer piece memorializing her. They’re running it in the Sunday paper.”

  “An article? There will be an article about her?” Stephen stares at his parents.

  “It’s a profile,” Michael says calmly. “We wanted to pay tribute.”

  “A shame it comes too late for the party,” Stephen mutters. “Would’ve made a lovely favor.”

  June glances up from her application of lipstick. “We thought you’d be pleased.” Her lips are rubies, glistening and red. Stephen looks away from her, shoving his hands into his pockets.

  “Tom Laughlin,” Michael says to Leo. “He heads the Arts and Culture section. Great guy.”

  They have a few minutes before they need to head back to the city. Michael and June’s gray sedan sits several spaces over, its hue the same color as the sky: luminous, mercurial. “What a waste,” Nora’s mother would have admonished. “What good is an SUV if you don’t fill it?” Nora imagines June sandwiched in the back of the Escalade, straddling the hump and looking put out, her black heel tapping.

  “We’ve been thinking about placing an ad in the Inquirer at work,” Leo comments. “Reaching out to more local companies.”

  “Talk to Tom tonight,” Michael suggests. “He was saying it’s been a record year for ads.”

  “Good for them.” Leo nods. “It’s the ads that sell a paper. That’s their whole revenue stream.”

  That and weddings. Leo has a special “Weddings” edition from the Inquirer hidden under his side of the bed, tucked away like a dirty magazine. Nora had flipped through its lists of vendors and pointed advice for couples. “Dear Philly Bride,” she imagined Leo writing, chewing on his pen. “My fiancée has a bald spot and is in protracted mourning for her dead mother. Is there a veil you’d recommend?”

  “The whole family can be in the paper!” Stephen chimes in brightly. “Parties, deaths, software. A cornucopia of Portman news.”

  They ignore him, but Nora wouldn’t be surprised if it actually came to pass. She can envision a write-up of the party: “Bloomsday Celebration Draws Elite Crowd.” Delancey had once been photographed for an article on interior design. Maybe the newspaper would recycle the handsome photograph they had on file, Michael and June standing by the staircase, looking elegant and refined.

  “Those two are like celebrities,” Nora’s mom once commented. Nora had laughed, but it was true in a way. Michael and June were so accustomed to a life of glamour that a tribute to Grandma Portman in the paper probably felt sincere to them. Nora can picture them in their master bedroom, June applying face cream. “We should commemorate her somehow,” she would say to her reflection. “Maybe a piece in the paper?” “Perfect,” Michael would reply. “I’ll call Tom.”

  It would never have occurred to them to mourn privately, as Stephen wished. Michael was probably relieved to call Tom, to have a to-do list, spreading his grief outward. Maybe this is Nora’s problem, that she holds her grief in, internalizing it, rather than distributing its weight.

  “The new book is coming out,” she remembers suddenly. “Is that next week, already?”

  “Tuesday,” June affirms, capping her lipstick.

  “Sweet of you to remember, Nora,” Michael says. “It’s an exciting moment for the author. Nothing like that first big review!”

  Nora sees a defiant pride break across his face. One day his company will make the front page: “Local Press Makes Waves.”

  Michael was formerly a funds manager in New York. Nora doesn’t understand these financial jobs, all so abstract and vague. “What exactly is a hedge fund?” she once asked him cautiously. But she was lost immediately in Michael’s explanation, the terms dizzying. “He stayed away from the shrubs,” Stephen liked to joke. “Avoided the trellis.”

  His specialty had been selling short. Which, if she understands correctly, meant that he bet against the market, anticipated declines. “But how does that work?” she persisted. “How do you profit from a decline?” “You can profit from anything,” Leo told her. “My dad just saw things that other people didn’t.” “But isn’t there an ethics to it, a problem of conscience?” “How do you mean?” Leo asked. “Because if you think something’s going to go down, you’re betting on people losing money.” Leo had smiled. “A lot of it is throu
gh derivatives, love,” he said reassuringly. “Meaning what?” “Meaning that it’s all Monopoly money anyway.”

  It makes Nora’s head hurt to think about such abstractions: buying and selling not objects, or even slices of companies making those objects, but ideas, all of it speculative, notions and forecasts factored into algorithms. What was it like to trade in intangibles?

  When Nora sings, she feels it in her body. People treat the arts as if they are obscure, finance as though it is concrete, but she has always thought it is just the opposite. Music is visceral. People respond to it right away. “You were so moving,” people will say after a performance, and Nora likes to think she has actually moved them, the sound waves traveling from her mouth into their bodies and causing an internal shift.

  “It’s not so complicated,” Michael told her of his work. “I just looked the other way. It’s hard to stand out when you’re all looking at the same data. So I started looking down when everyone else was looking up.” He shrugged, as though describing something simple.

  All she knows for sure is that he had done spectacularly well. He’d made enough that he could purchase the town house on Delancey, that dignified strip of privilege, and have his wife renovate it extravagantly. Enough that he could start his publishing house without worrying over whether it would be profitable. “Small presses usually aren’t,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

  Dubliner Books had put out a few chapbooks of poetry, some experimental fiction, and now this biography. “You should have an online presence,” Leo urged. “Not just company information, but actual content, like online poems or whatever. People could read this stuff from their phones.”

  Michael smiled tolerantly at the idea, but Nora senses a different a side of him is nurtured by publishing. He often appears at brunch with ink stains on his fingers. “You’re just getting in the way over there!” June chastises. “As if you’re a tradesman!” After the table is cleared of dishes, he spreads sample layouts across its surface. “Which one do you think, Nora?” he asks, indicating with a tilt of his head for her to come over. The surprise of his kindness never wears off.

  Nora suspects that Michael thrills to the tangible nature of publishing. He is like a farmer, cultivating books in lieu of crops. He shares stories of his labors on Sundays, regaling them with tales of the printing machines and drawers of type.

  “Wait, they do it by hand?” Leopold once asked, incredulous. “Surely there’s a better way.”

  But Michael had chosen to work with that particular letterpress company because he was charmed by its approach, its dedication to the art of printing. The company is owned by a woman, Helen, in her twenties. “Just out of art school, all on her own,” Michael marveled. He was filled with admiration when he described her. “How quickly she does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems to see with her fingers.” Leo sulked when Michael sang her praises, a jealous pet forced to watch another animal get rewarded.

  The printing company operates out of an old warehouse down by the river. “You should hear the racket!” Michael likes to crow. Nora imagines it is the great clang of productivity—people making actual things—that he fell for, so different from the hustle of Wall Street.

  Michael gazes at his finished products reverently, a boy beaming over his latest creation. The first chapbook of poetry was an eyesore, a ghastly shade of gray with a dark-purple font. “I now have a say in color,” June says airily whenever the books are brought out.

  “You’d think you’d have more sympathy for the guy,” Nora once remarked to Stephen. “He clearly loves books.”

  “You clearly love him,” Stephen returned. “Don’t let his labor of love fool you, Nora. The business of books is still very much a business.”

  It’s true that Michael’s sense of ambition is palpable. His imprint will probably be purchased by a top publisher one day; if anyone could find a way to make poetry profitable, it is Michael. June, by contrast, exudes ennui as she floats through Delancey’s rooms, led by nothing more than her whims.

  June dabbles in pet projects, keeping their social calendar filled with museum galas and black-tie benefits. She periodically sets out her watercolors and easel in her immaculate white office and then shrugs nonchalantly when friends coo, “June! My goodness. How do you find the time?” while gazing at her drippy abstractions.

  Meanwhile, the groceries get delivered, the dry cleaning dropped off, the pillows plumped by strange hands. June hands out keys like she is the mayor. Nora wonders how many of them must be circulating through the city, in various pockets, dangling from key chains.

  Strangers handle the most intimate details at Delancey—walking the dog, swapping hydrangeas for peonies in the thick, crystal globes. All June ever sees of them is their bill. Maybe that’s the whole point of hiring someone. If you start wondering about the people fingering your underwear, arranging it in lacy rows, you might as well be doing it yourself.

  “Girl, she be havin’ a closet organizer,” Carol declared in her Trinidadian accent, the words lilting. Carol keeps her own key around her neck on a cord of silk. She and Nora had become fast friends when they discovered they had singing in common.

  “A closet organizer!” Carol bellowed. “How can you be organizin’ somethin’—” Carol paused, clutching her sides.

  “—that doesn’t exist!” Nora completed, and the two of them howled with laughter.

  June had insisted on removing the house’s closets, a notion she had learned about in one of her classes. “A lifestyle class,” Stephen scoffed. “Taught by some pseudospiritual wonk for Rittenhouse wives. She tries to pass it off as an architecture seminar.”

  It wasn’t merely that the closet doors had been removed. The framing had been pulled, whole walls blown open. “But where do you hide things?” Nora whispered to Stephen as they went from room to room. The pre-company ritual in her own house had been to stuff everything behind doors and then pray no one opened them. “The whole point is that you don’t,” he muttered.

  Delancey had a feeling of openness that you couldn’t quite place, like going to a city with no visible power lines. Nora delighted in pointing out the house’s salient feature to guests. She watched as comprehension dawned on their faces. “A house without closets!” they exclaimed, shaking their heads.

  Stephen and Leo must have detested it—two teenage boys, unable to be messy. Every item in Delancey has a place, exact and perfect. “When you put things out of sight, you invite disorder,” June liked to say.

  For Michael, his wife’s vision of bright rooms thrown open to the light was perhaps a comfort after all those years in New York. Not just because he’d worked long hours in dark offices, but because he had stuffed away his passions. Perhaps he felt liberated, freed of the pressure to accomplish and earn, able to do what he loves. No more skeletons! Delancey trumpeted. Michael had dusted off his dreams and brought them out of hiding.

  Leo had been glad to leave New York. “Wasn’t it hard, being the new kid?” Nora asked him. She couldn’t imagine starting school in a new place, walking the halls that first day. Leo shrugged his trademark shrug, one shoulder tossed up in the air, his jaw tilting to meet it. On balance, no big deal, his upper torso declared.

  Leo’s upbringing was so different from her own in New Jersey. The girls at Union High smacked their gum and did each other’s nails in homeroom. The guys were smart alecks. She had been the freak for doing well, the honor roll a place of shame. What saved her from being an outcast was her voice. “Well, well,” the music teacher had said, looking at her appraisingly. That was in the fifth grade, Mr. Granato. Everyone thought he was a pedophile, spreading the rumor even though they had no basis for it. And why? Why on earth had they done that? She later wondered if he had some inkling of it, poor Mr. Granato, the kids jeering behind his back.

  She had been in every musical and concert from that point forward. It was a given that the lead
would go to her. Grease. Les Mis. West Side Story. They were awful productions. The school never had the money for good costumes or sets. Nora used to raid her mom’s closet for outfits from other decades. Meanwhile, she kept quiet at school about her training, never mentioning her voice lessons, her summer courses at the Met. Only at Yale did she feel she could finally embrace opera without being judged for it.

  “So I gather you don’t think she should be in the paper,” Michael says to Stephen, jarring Nora from her thoughts. His question comes out as a statement, seeking confirmation, but it is empty of reproach.

  Stephen shifts. “There wouldn’t be an article about her if it weren’t for your connections. She was hardly a cultural icon.”

  “She came to this country in 1939. A remarkable time to live through.”

  “And you think that warrants a feature in the paper?”

  “I think she deserves a feature in the paper.”

  “But not a proper mourning.”

  Michael closes his eyes.

  “That’s enough,” June says, snapping her clutch. Shaped like a clamshell, it reminds Nora of a set of jaws. Some company makes these bags, hard and jeweled, like glittering weapons. Nora has seen them toted around by June’s friends. A collection of them sit on a shelf in her noncloset. “We’ve done the best we can. Nothing about death is convenient.”

  Stephen smiles sadly to himself.

  How cold they can be. They never react with feeling, with heart. Even their dilemmas feel supercilious. Should Granny be in the Arts section? Should we cancel the gala? These are sort of grandiose problems, Nora wants to tell them. You guys get that, right?