Chapter 7
Carla Weiss from the children’s hospital cried on the phone at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, which was early even for Carla.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry to do this to you today, of all days. I know you’ve been through a terrible, terrible week.”
“It’s okay, Carla. Just tell me.”
Caroline was standing in Stephanie’s kitchen in her socks, holding a cup of coffee she hadn’t drunk. Outside the window, the sky over Fishtown was a flat, heavy white. The radio on the refrigerator was saying something about snow later. A few inches overnight, the man said, maybe more.
“It’s the Delaware Valley Trust and Bristow Kane,” Carla said.
“The two lead sponsors. They called me last night. Both of them. They said—” she sniffed hard, “—they said they’ve always sponsored the Snow Ball because of the Bradshaws.
Because it’s your night. The two of you.
And they said with everything in the news, if you and Connor aren’t both there tonight, hosting it the way you always do, they’ll have to pull their names. And their money.”
Caroline closed her eyes.
The Snow Ball was nine years old. She and Connor had started it the winter after their wedding, for the children’s hospital, in the Hadley’s atrium.
The first year, it had been a hundred people and a string quartet and a bake sale.
Last year it had been four hundred people and a live band, and it had paid for most of a new cancer floor for kids.
The two lead sponsors paid for half of it.
“How much is their half this year?” Caroline asked.
Carla told her.
Caroline put down her coffee.
“I told them it wasn’t fair,” Carla said. “I told them you shouldn’t have to stand next to him after what he did. I told them that. I did. But they’re banks, Caroline. They’re lawyers. They care about the pictures. And I have forty kids on the fourth floor who—” Her voice broke.
“I know, Carla.”
“I’ll understand. I want you to know I’ll understand if you say no. Everybody will.”
Caroline looked out at the white sky.
She thought about the kids on the fourth floor. She had been there. She went every year, on the Monday after the Snow Ball, with a bag of stuffed reindeer. Connor used to come with her. He had not come last year.
“I’ll be there,” she said. “Tell them we’ll both be there.”
She hung up before Carla could start crying again.
Then she picked up her phone and opened her messages. The last text in the thread with her husband was from last Monday night. I’m outside. I’m sorry. I’m going. She had not written to him since the fire escape.
She typed for a long time. She deleted most of it. What she sent was short.
The Snow Ball tonight. The hospital needs both of us there, or they lose the sponsors. I’m doing it for the kids. Terms: No touching. No photographs of the two of us together. No speeches about the marriage, from you or anyone. If you can’t do all three, don’t come.
She sent it and put the phone face-down on the counter.
It buzzed thirty seconds later.
I’ll be there at six-thirty. Those terms. All three.
That was all. No thank you. No I miss you. No can we talk after.
She stood in Stephanie’s kitchen and looked at the four short lines for a long time. She did not know why her eyes were stinging.
* * *
She did not have a dress.
She realized it at four o’clock, in her office, when Luz stuck her head in and asked what she was wearing. Every gown Caroline owned was in the closet of the townhouse on Rittenhouse Square. And most of them, she thought, he had bought.
“I’ll wear what I have on,” Caroline said.
Luz looked at her black work dress, which had a small coffee stain near the hem and a candy cane in the pocket.
“No,” Luz said. “You won’t.”
Twenty minutes later, Luz came back with three gowns over her arm from the third floor.
Caroline tried them on behind the door of her office, with Luz sitting on the desk critiquing.
The first one was gold and made her look like a trophy.
The second one was black and made her look like she was going to a funeral.
The third one was a deep, dark green velvet with long sleeves and no back at all.
Luz took one look and said, “That one.”
“It’s too much.”
“It’s exactly enough.” Luz folded her arms. “It’s not his. You paid for it. Let him look.”
Caroline paid for it at the register on the third floor, at full price, with her own card. The girl at the register tried to give her the staff discount. Caroline wouldn’t let her.
At six o’clock, she put her hair up in the office mirror and put on red lipstick. One red thing. She looked at herself for a long moment.
Then she went out to host a party with her husband.
* * *
The atrium did not look like a department store anymore.
The crew had worked since the doors closed at five.
The Santa chair was gone. The perfume counters were covered in white cloth and turned into bars.
Forty round tables stood on the marble floor, set in silver and white.
Tall birch trees in pots, strung with tiny white lights, made a forest along the walls.
At the far end, by the organ, a band was setting up.
And under the dome, the mistletoe turned slowly on its wire above the gold star, the way it always did.
Caroline had asked the crew to set a table right on top of the star this year. They had. It was covered with a long white cloth. You couldn’t see the star at all.
Connor came in through the Walnut Street doors at six twenty-eight.
She was at the top of the mezzanine stairs going over the seating chart with Carla. She saw him the second he came in. She told herself it was because she was watching the door for guests.
He was in a black tuxedo. He’d had his hair cut. He had shaved very close. He had a little snow on the shoulders of his coat, and he stopped inside the doors and brushed it off, and gave the coat to the coat-check girl, and said something to her that made her smile.
Then he looked up at the mezzanine.
He found her right away. He always had. She was in green velvet at the top of the stairs, and he looked at her, and for one second his face did something she could not bear to watch. Then he looked down, and when he looked up again, his face was calm and polite and closed.
He walked across the atrium and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Not on the stairs. At the bottom, a good ten feet away.
“Caroline,” he said.
“Connor.”
“Where do you want me?”
It was such a simple question. It was the question he used to ask her every year at six-thirty. Where do you want me? And she would tell him. Door. Bar. Talk to the Lundgrens, they’re mad about their table.
“The receiving line is at the top of the stairs,” she said. “Carla’s between us.”
“Okay.”
He came up and stood where Carla put him. Carla, who was small and round and had cried already twice today, stood between them like a very nervous wall.
* * *
The guests came in at seven.
Four hundred people came up the mezzanine stairs in their gowns and tuxedos, shaking snow off their shoulders.
Every one of them had seen the video. It was on their faces as they came up the steps.
They looked at her, and then at Connor, and then at the space between them where Carla stood.
Some of them tried not to look. Some of them looked hard.
Nobody said anything about it. Nobody would. That was the whole point of these people.
And somewhere around the fortieth guest, it happened.
A tall, heavy man in a plaid bow tie started up the stairs with a thin woman on his arm. Caroline knew the face. She had met him, she was sure, maybe five times. She could not for the life of her remember his name.
Over Carla’s head, very low, Connor said, “Ed Lundgren. His wife’s Dee. She had her knee done in October.”
Caroline didn’t look at him. She smiled at the woman coming up the steps.
“Dee!” she said warmly. “You’re walking! How’s the knee?”
Dee Lundgren lit up like a Christmas tree. She told Caroline all about the knee. Ed Lundgren shook Connor’s hand and told him the Eagles were a disgrace this year, and Connor agreed that they were a disgrace, and the Lundgrens went off happy to the bar.
The next couple came up.
This time Caroline knew the name and Connor didn’t. It was on his face, that small blankness. She said, without turning her head, “Anita and Sam Desai. The new pediatric wing is named after her mother.” Connor said, “Anita, Sam, thank you both for coming,” as if he’d known them for twenty years.
It went like that.
It went like that for an hour. She gave him names.
He gave her names. He knew which donor had just sold a company and wanted to be congratulated about it.
She knew which donor had just lost a husband and didn’t want anyone to mention it.
When a very old man with a cane lost his balance on the top step, they both put out a hand at the same time from opposite sides of Carla, and caught him, and did not touch each other.
It was easy.
That was the terrible part. It was so easy. It was nine years of doing exactly this, and her body remembered all of it. She knew where he would be without looking. She knew when he was about to laugh. She felt him there on the other side of Carla the way you feel the sun on the side of your face.
And he kept every one of her terms.
He never touched her. He never came closer than Carla.
When a photographer from the Inquirer’s society page came up the stairs and lifted his camera at the two of them, Connor stepped out of the line, smiled at the man, and said something short.
The photographer lowered the camera, nodded, and went and took a picture of the band instead.
* * *
The auction started at eight-thirty.
Every year, the two of them opened the auction together from the little stage by the organ. Every year, they had a routine. Caroline had thought about it all afternoon. She had decided she would let Carla do it this year, and she had told Carla so.