Thirty-Four
When they were finally through the dismal holiday season, the old year mercifully behind them, Finn and Nina started to settle into a routine, and it was possible to feel they’d soon be through the worst of it.
The conversations with their respective children were every bit as awful as they’d expected and then some.
The kids vacillated between hurt and angry, never at the same time, so Finn and Nina invariably dealt with a concentrated stew of both.
They waited weeks to be seen together in public—they weren’t allowed to attend Connie Pavone’s funeral—and even though all their friends and relatives knew what had happened and where they were living, nobody called or visited.
Some people wouldn’t speak to them. Thomas politely suggested Nina might want to take a “sabbatical” from the paper.
She knew what that meant. Some folks quietly squeezed Nina’s hand when she was out and about, and she never really understood why.
Were the hand squeezes signaling support, passing along their own desperation, pitying her for this gravest of sins?
All this was harder for Finn than it was for her.
She’d never been interested in the social life at the country club or attended any of their organized events: the Valentine’s dance, the Mother’s Day brunch, the Father’s Day pancake breakfast, and on and on.
For years, she’d successfully begged off going to church on Sundays, saying she needed to shop, cook, and write and wasn’t it nice for Sam and the girls to go to Mass and out for breakfast just the three of them?
She wasn’t a believer, but Finn was, and after a few failed attempts at asking him to explain to her how he squared their circumstances with his faith, she gave up.
His justifications, the way he was able to twist rules into exceptions, was one of the things she hated about organized religion—its blurry borders and muscular hypocrisy for the anointed few, the people with resources, the donors.
But if the church leadership was content to give Finn a gentle slap on the wrist and slip his check into the back pocket of their black trousers, his fellow parishioners were not so kind.
His first time back at the eleven fifteen a.m. Mass on the third Sunday of January was designed to avoid Honey and his kids, who generally went to the nine a.m. service.
Everyone noticed him, but not a single person approached.
“Not one!” he said to Nina when he got home, looking pale, shook. “During the sign of peace, everyone acted as if I wasn’t there. Like I was a leper. Worse! An apparition.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s going to take time.”
They sat at the tiny table in the kitchen of their small Craftsman bungalow, the one they’d seen as a temporary solution until they figured out the best place to buy their own home, but now that their finances had changed, they’d extended the lease for the rest of the year.
Finn stared into space, slack-jawed, looking visibly older.
For the entirety of her first marriage, she had been the one responsible for lifting the mood in the house, constantly performing a little tap dance to distract from Sam’s disaffected presence.
When the affair with Finn began, she reveled in his exuberance, happily passed the mood baton to him, but now it seemed to be back in her hand.
Instead of being disappointed, she was almost grateful and wondered why she and Sam couldn’t have taken turns bolstering the other, why they hadn’t fed off each other emotionally.
Nina had often wondered if her and Finn’s lust was capacious enough for love or grief or disappointment.
Well, here it was. And she was determined to pull them through this moment.
Moment was probably too optimistic a word.
This phase? This transition! Yes, that was it.
They were all in a period of transition, and transitions were hard, change was hard, it stirred up powerful emotions.
But, Nina insisted to herself, on the other side of change was opportunity.
Who could they all be, now that she and Finn had thrown the cards in the air and invited everyone to redefine their lives? Everything felt possible.
“Come upstairs with me?” she said, holding a hand out to him.
What Nina couldn’t get over, the feeling she wanted to hold on to as long as possible, was how everything felt sensual to her.
Everything. The thrilling casual intimacy, the sight of their tangled mussed bed every morning, the musky smell of the sheets.
The places they eagerly made love—the bed, the kitchen, the sofa.
A solid fuck on the desk of Finn’s office the day he was cleaning it out and later that afternoon a furtive but satisfying grope in refrigerator number three, which bordered on sacrilegious and because of that was incredibly hot.
Some days, they were like teenagers who’d just discovered sex.
She sometimes saw herself as if she were watching another, better Nina from above.
Nina on her knees pleasuring Finn and sauntering across the living room, stark naked, to get a glass of wine.
She’d driven to Buffalo one morning to buy lingerie.
Completely unnecessary, bordering on ridiculous.
She could have quietly bought silky nightgowns and racier bras and lacy panties in any number of stores in Rochester without anyone knowing who she was, but she enjoyed performing deception now that they were safely husband and wife.
They took refuge in one another. They wintered.
Everyone else was inside during these short, cold days anyway.
She was surprised to find that she didn’t miss writing her old column, but she did miss teaching the cooking classes.
Before the elopement, she’d agreed to give a series of three classes at Saint Benedict’s parish center, which had a huge kitchen.
The program was centered around Easter: the first week was Easter Brunch Favorites, the second an Elegant Easter Dinner, and the final class Easter for the Family, which would feature cakes and candies that the women (it was always women) could make with their children.
The slots had filled quickly, and so Nina worked diligently on the menus.
If these went well, maybe she could do a quarterly series.
Maybe monthly. She arrived at the kitchen early to set up eight workstations and do all her prep.
She was nervous but excited. She waited.
And waited. Finally, the door swung open, and Bess came barging through, “Sorry! Sorry I’m late.
” Bess stopped in her tracks and took one look at the empty kitchen and shook her head. “Those bitches,” she said.
NINA ASSURED HERSELF THAT BY the time the weather softened and the sun returned and the trees began to bud, at around the time the daffodils were waving their buoyant bonnets in the breeze, the town would be tired of the gossip.
Tired of freezing her out. But spring was punishingly late, and although it was ludicrous to take the weather personally, Rochester made it hard not to feel that it was meteorologically against you, particularly when the winter came early and refused to leave.
The first week of April, she was still wearing her winter coat, her hat and gloves, those infernal snow boots.
Finn had been offering to fly them somewhere warm since mid-February, but she wasn’t ready to hightail it out of town just yet.
And not for any trip that would be too reminiscent of their December wedding.
She was finally starting to remember the good of those days and not their churning wake.
But Nina’d had enough of Clara’s cruelty.
Nina had given Clara time, as everyone said she should.
She’d let Clara dictate the terms and Clara had acted like a terrorist. Nina wasn’t allowed in her old house.
Bridie could go to Nina’s new house but not stay for dinner because Clara was the one who made dinner now and Bridie needed to be home for the “family” meal every night.
Bridie could sleep over one night a week, but not two.
Nina had expected the hardest part about their elopement’s aftermath would be dealing with Sam, but it was Clara who made life miserable for all of them.
And poor Bridie. Nina could see Bridie pulling away from her for fear of Clara’s ire.
One afternoon, Clara had rung the front doorbell to call Bridie home for dinner.
Nina answered the door, and her heart started pounding when she saw Clara through the window. But Clara wouldn’t cross the threshold.
“I’m here for my sister,” she said coolly.
“Clara,” Nina said, “please come inside and sit down. You can’t go for the rest of your life or even the rest of this year without talking to me. This is silly.”
Clara stared at Nina, crossed her arms. “I’m silly.”
“Clara, please.”
She yelled over Nina’s shoulder. “Bridie! Get out here!”
Bridie appeared in the living room behind her mother.
“I think I’m going to stay here for dinner,” she said, looking terrified and small, and even that set Clara off—not Bridie’s disloyalty, but the meek way she seemed to be begging for permission.
“Get some backbone, Bridie,” Clara said, storming down the front steps and nearly slipping on the ice.
“Are you okay?” Nina hurried down the steps to help Clara.
“I’m fine!” Clara snapped at her.
Nina went back into the house and found a tearful Bridie. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. This will get better.” But would it?
Finn and Nina started to make a few tentative forays into a social life as partners.
Finn wanted to host an elaborate dinner party, but Nina did not.
She claimed it was because all of her supplies were back at her old house: her specialty pantry items and copper pots and treasured cast-iron Dutch ovens and honed knives.
“I’ll buy new ones,” he said, impatient and uncomprehending.
It had taken years for her to acquire all the things she now missed.
And this inexplicable development: she didn’t want to cook.
Every time she walked into their kitchen and opened the cabinets or the refrigerator to plan dinner, she became catastrophically tired.
She would brew a pot of tea and sit on the sofa, which hadn’t been broken in yet by husbands or roughhousing children or hours and hours of television, and open her book.
The next thing she knew, Finn was gently shaking her awake in a darkening room.
Finn was confused by her unwillingness to cook for the two of them.
“Let’s invite people out to dinner,” she suggested to him.
“One couple at a time. See whom we can trust.” They both understood that whether people in town approved or disapproved of their choices, Finn now had the foundation’s significant budget at his disposal, an efficient balm to a lot of local outrage.
The morning after one of those dinners, one that had gone well because it was with a former business contact of Finn’s looking for a hefty donation, Bridie called Nina early in the morning to report that Clara didn’t feel well and was home alone.
Nina understood. When she allowed herself to parse her current indifference in the kitchen, she realized that in her previous life, cooking was a way to fill a house devoid of marital love with a more tangible kind of love.
A meal was an offering, an act of care and intimacy.
She didn’t need to cook for Finn, but every fiber of her being wanted to nourish her daughters.
She got to work making all of Clara’s favorite nursery foods.
Corn bread. Rice pudding. Toll House cookies with oats because that’s how Clara liked them.
She swung by Finnegan’s—she still attracted sidelong glances, but she’d gotten good at ignoring them—and picked up saltines and Ritz crackers and ginger ale and orange juice.
Campbell’s Chicken & Stars, Progresso meatball soup, Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese, glazed donuts.
She made a detour to Don’s Original for the chocolate almond frozen custard Clara loved so much and thought how Finn should try to get the product into the freezers at Finnegan’s and quickly marveled at her ability to abet the kind of predatory behavior she’d always complained about before remembering that Finn was no longer acquiring products for the store.
She certainly wasn’t gifting Helen Harper any of her good ideas.
She stopped at a bookstore and bought Glamour and Seventeen and Mademoiselle and Redbook and a bunch of tabloid papers.
She bought aspirin and Midol and Pepto Bismol to cover all the bases.
A peace offering, a ticket past the front door, a gesture she hoped would thaw the air between her and Clara just a little.
It had been almost four months. Four months of Clara making a point.
Nina’d only been to the house twice since she left, once the day after they returned to Rochester, the awful conversation with the girls, Bridie sobbing, Clara stone-cold, Sam glowering in the other room.
The second time on Christmas morning, which felt like the worst one-act play anyone had ever been forced to perform.
On her way out that afternoon, Sam handed over her “personal effects,” which he’d tossed into boxes with such disregard she could feel the force of his anger every time she peered into one.
Bras and panties mixed with loose jewelry and hair clips and, weirdly, a flashlight that she’d stored on the nightstand in case of winter power outages.
Cosmetics all akimbo. A bunch of dress shoes but nothing practical.
He’d thrown a bottle of Chanel No. 19 in with her good sweaters, and it spilled and ruined everything.
It was as if a deranged animal had packed the boxes.
Car loaded with all her peace offerings for an ailing Clara, Nina drove the fifteen blocks to her old house. As always, a key to the back door sat under one of the terra cotta pots on the back step. She let herself into the kitchen.