The Dearly Departed. Elinor Lipman

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СКАЧАТЬ warranted. Her appearance at an event injected a guessing game into the dull photo opportunity—this faux-pearled and eagle-brooched character was which woman in Margaret Batten’s repertoire?

      “Please don’t do it,” Sunny would plead. “Please don’t let them put your picture in the Bulletin again.”

      “But that’s exactly why they hire me—so someone reading about the event will say, ‘Oh my goodness. Look! A famous person came to the ground-breaking of the new branch. Isn’t that Barbara, hon?’”

      “It doesn’t fool anyone. It’s not being an actress. It’s a sight gag. And then you leave and go to the supermarket, and my friends say, ‘I saw your mother yesterday at Foodland in a gray wig.’ Or, ‘She was wearing a necklace of shellacked peanuts. Must have been Rosalyn’s turn,’ with this look that says, Is she mental?”

      “It’s theater,” her mother would say, “an acting job that pays—which makes me a professional. It’s your college fund. Besides, you of all people know I don’t care what the neighbors think.”

      Sunny wrote to the long-absent John Batten every few months, and he wrote back. “Sincerely, John,” he signed his dull, typed letters on the firm’s letterhead. Neither correspondent invoked the terms father or daughter; Sunny did not accuse him of abandoning or failing her, because she understood without being told that there were complications that no one liked to discuss. Sunny studied her mother’s wedding pictures and puzzled over the groom’s dominant brown eyes and dark wavy hair, his short arms and thick neck. Artificial insemination, she guessed after reading a cover story on the subject in Time.

      John’s wife and office manager, Bonnie, added a banal postscript to every letter—“8 straight days of temps over 100!” or “driving to San Diego to see the pandas,” which Sunny interpreted to mean: John and I have no secrets. I know whenever he writes to you. I protect him. Mostly, Sunny and John corresponded about golf, which he’d taken up in the Sun Belt. He hoped she was taking lessons, and Sunny told him no, but that she took illustrated books by Sam Snead and Ben Hogan out of the library and closely watched the best players at the club. He advised her which hand-me-down clubs, which compounds of steel and new alloys, she should keep and which she should put on consignment. He told her not to ignore her short game. She wrote back and said she was trying to spend an hour a day on the putting green. Was that, in his opinion, enough? “If you’re sinking those three-foot white-knucklers with some consistency, it is,” he answered. He never asked about Margaret, and Sunny didn’t ask about his wife. He didn’t call or send gifts or ask for custodial visits. “I never really knew him,” she’d explain to friends who asked about a father. Or, to close the subject: “He died before I was born.”

      From Pennsylvania, Miles Finn continued to pay taxes on his New Hampshire property, an unheated Depression-era cottage with three dark rooms and outdoor plumbing. It was on a minor lake so ordinary and unscenic that one would wonder what inspired him to travel six hours to swim in black water and pee into a fetid hole. The crawl space housed an ancient canoe and an antique archery set; inside, there were moldy jigsaw puzzles, scratchy wool blankets, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed canvas chairs, mouse droppings, the occasional bat, and the empty gin and beer bottles frequently found in near-forsaken cabins.

      Margaret aired out the place every spring, defrosted the shoebox-sized freezer as needed, kept clean linens on the bigger bed. If it was a quick trip to close a window before rain or to leave a welcome casserole, Sunny would wait in the car. The cottage, Margaret explained, belonged to friends from Philadelphia—“Finn,” according to slapdash strokes of white paint on a slat—who’d been coming to King George forever.

      “Do they have any kids?” Sunny asked hopefully.

      “It’s just one person,” Margaret said. “An attorney. I worked for him before you were born.”

      It sounded right to Sunny that her mother would bring casseroles to an old, childless man who could afford nothing better than vacations at Boot Lake. Over the years, as Margaret headed off alone with her pail and sponges and a flush particular to this mission, Sunny adjusted her view of Mr. Finn. She sensed that the former boss had become a boyfriend—so typically charitable of her mother. Not that sex was involved, Sunny thought. Sex didn’t fit Margaret. It had to be a crush, durable yes, but no more fertile or reciprocated than the ones Sunny herself had on teachers at King George Regional or on golfers on TV.

      Miles called it his retreat, and if any woman—first his wife, then subsequent girlfriends—voiced suspicions about his treks to Boot Lake, he would say, “If only you could see the camp. I don’t even bathe when I’m there. No woman would set foot in this dump. Of course I love it, but that’s a childhood thing. No one else will go near the place.”

      He made the romantic terms clear to Margaret, semi-annually. He was married, with everything to lose personally and professionally. He wasn’t inviting love affairs or headlines.

      He didn’t volunteer personal details unless she inquired: Yes, there’d been a separation. Yes, in fact, a divorce. Yes, he was dating in Philadelphia, but only when necessary; only when he needed presentable companions for black-tie events. They had sex quickly on her fabric softener-scented sheets during her lunch hour, and didn’t speak again until he called six months later with a jangle of quarters from a phone booth. “Guess who?” he’d say each time, and always she’d have a clever answer ready: An old boss? A charming dinner companion from Philly? Tomorrow’s lunch date?

      For a long time, she thought she had no right to mind. Twice-yearly dates didn’t make her his girlfriend or his confidante. She wasn’t above this flimsy attention—she who’d broken her marriage vows and several Commandments. But eventually she joined the Players, and was lauded in print for her understated ardor. Now when he called from the road, Margaret was not being coy when she hesitated before answering his “Guess who?”

      “Is someone there with you?” he asked.

      “Miles? Oh, sorry. I wasn’t sure. How are you? Where are you?”

      “I’m about twenty-five minutes from there, and you know how I am.” He dropped his voice. “Ready, willing, and able.”

      She began to ask, as she sat on the edge of the bed, rolling her panty hose back up, if they could go out, if he could pick her up, if they couldn’t have something approximating a date. “I know what you’ve always said: ‘No calls, no letters between visits, no paper trail.’ But we never get a chance to talk. We could drive to Vermont, to an inn, then stay the night. Sunny can stay with a friend. We’re both divorced. There wouldn’t be a scandal even if we were caught.” She didn’t say, “You lost the election sixteen years ago. You’re a private citizen. No one knows who Miles Finn is anymore.”

      He always answered the same way: Communication didn’t always have to be spoken, did it? Wasn’t what they had special and unconventional? Did she prefer a restaurant dinner to a passionate lunch?

      If he asked about Sunny, it was from the polite distance of a man who had no reason and no desire to meet his occasional paramour’s child. On these trips—fish all morning, fuck Margaret at lunch without any wining or dining or conversation; nap, read, drink, sleep—he didn’t want to think about anyone but himself. His son, Fletcher, was a teenager, the same age as the girl. These visits wouldn’t last forever: Fletcher was asking questions, and Margaret was asking for proper dates. She’d even used the words “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea anymore.” Margaret, he gathered, had other men calling her among the locals. And soon a devoted, alternate-weekend father like himself, claiming to be tying flies and frying trout alone in New Hampshire, would have to invite his kid along.

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