Page 114 of Still Me
“Stop flapping, Louisa. I fell in love with someone unsuitable when I was grieving my husband and I became pregnant. I had the baby but it caused a bit of a stir, and in the end it was considered better for everyone if my parents brought him up in Westchester.”
“Where is he now?”
“Still in Westchester. As far as I know.”
I blinked. “You don’t see him?”
“Oh, I did. I saw him every weekend and vacation for the whole of his childhood. But once he reached adolescence he grew rather angry with me for not being the kind of mother he thought I should be. I had to make a choice, you see. In those days it wasn’t common to work if you married or had children. And I chose work. I honestly felt I would die without it. And Frank—my boss—supported me.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, my son has never really forgiven me.”
There was a long silence.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. So am I. But what’s done is done and there’s no point dwelling.” She began to cough so I poured her a glass of water and handed it to her. She motioned toward a bottle of pills that she kept on thesideboard and I waited while she swallowed one. She settled herself again, like a hen that had ruffled her feathers.
“What was his name?” I asked, when she had recovered.
“More questions... Frank Junior.”
“So his father was—”
“My editor at the magazine, yes. Frank Aldridge. He was significantly older than I was and married, and I’m afraid that was my son’s other great resentment. It was rather hard for him at school. People were different about these things, then.”
“When did you last see him? Your son, I mean.”
“That would be... 1987. The year he married. I found out about it after the event and wrote him a letter telling him how hurt I was that he hadn’t included me, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I had long since relinquished any right to be included in anything to do with his life.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Her face was perfectly still and it was impossible to tell what she was thinking, or even if she was now simply focused on the television. I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t find any words that were up to a hurt that great. But then she turned to me.
“And that was it. My mother died a couple of years later and she was my last point of contact with him. I do sometimes wonder how he is—if he’s even alive, whether he had children. I wrote to him for a while. But over the years I suppose I’ve become rather philosophical about the whole thing. He was quite right, of course. I had no right to him, really, to anything to do with his life.”
“But he was your son,” I whispered.
“He was, but I hadn’t really behaved like a mother, had I?” She took a shaky breath. “I’ve had a very good life, Louisa. I loved my job and I worked with some wonderful people. I traveled to Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, far more than most women my age... I had my beautiful apartment and some excellent friends. You mustn’t worry about me. All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”
We sat in silence, digesting this. Then she placed her hands squarelyon her knees. “Actually, dear girl, would you help me to my bathroom? I’m feeling quite tired and I think I might take myself to bed.”
—
That night I lay awake, thinking about what she had told me. I thought about Agnes and the fact that these two women, living yards away from each other, both cloaked in a very specific sadness, might, in another world, have been a comfort to each other. I thought about the fact that there seemed to be such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low. But I knew that already, didn’t I? I had come here and it had cost me dear.
Often in the small hours I conjured Will’s voice telling me not to be ridiculous and melancholy but to think instead of all the things I’d achieved. I lay in the dark and ticked off my achievements on my fingers. I had a home—for the time being at least. I had paid employment. I was still in New York, and I was among friends. I had a new relationship, even if sometimes I wondered how I had ended up in it. Could I really say that I would have done things any differently?
But it was the old woman in the next room I was thinking of when I finally slept.
—
There were fourteen sporting trophies on Josh’s shelf, four of them the size of my head, for American football, baseball, something called track and field, and a junior trophy for a spelling bee. I had been there before but it was only now, sober and unhurried, that I was able to take in my surroundings and the scale of his achievements. There were pictures of him in sporting garb, preserved at the moment of his triumphs, his arms clasped around his teammates, those perfect teeth in a perfect smile. I thought of Patrick and the multitude of certificates on the wall of his apartment, and wondered at the male need to display achievements, like a peacock permanently shimmering his tail.
When Josh put down the phone, I jumped. “It’s only takeout. I’m afraid with everything at work I don’t have time for anything else right now. But this is the best Korean food south of Koreatown.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I had no other Korean food experiences to judge it by. I was just enjoying the prospect of coming to see him. Walking to catch the subway south, I had relished the novelty of headingdowntown without battling either Siberian winds, deep snow, or torrential, icy rain.
And Josh’s apartment was not quite the rabbit hutch he’d described, unless your rabbit had decided to move into a renovated loft in an area that had apparently once housed artists’ studios but now formed a base for four different versions of Marc Jacobs, punctuated by artisan jewelers, specialist coffee shops, and boutiques that employed men with earpieces on the doorstep. It was all whitewashed walls and oak floors, with a modernistic marble table and a distressed leather sofa. The smattering of a few carefully chosen ornaments and pieces of furniture suggested everything had been carefully considered, sourced, and earned, perhaps through the services of an interior designer.
He had brought me flowers, a delicious mix of hyacinths and freesias. “What are these for?” I said.
He shrugged as he shepherded me in. “I just saw them on the way home from work and thought you might like them.”
