The James Deans

baby.”

“Oh, for chrissakes! She was happy today. Where is she?”

Aaron shrugged. “Still in the bathroom with Cindy.”

Needless to say, my presence was less than welcomed in the ladies’ room. Anyone who could flee did so at the sound of my voice. Only the attendant, a wrinkled old black woman in pink polyester and a silly frilled hat, protested. I chucked a twenty in her tip basket and her squawking came to an abrupt end. I nodded for Cindy to wait outside.

“Just tell everyone the toilets are flooding.”

Guilty, wounded, Katy couldn’t look at me. She angled her legs and chin toward the stall wall, her chest heaving as she tried to suppress her tears. I knelt down in front of her and held her hand. Her face was a mask of trembling embarrassment.

“It’s okay, kiddo. You’ve gotta stop punishing yourself like this. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

A month, two months ago, these words would have been magic. Abracadabra! Presto chango! She would have stopped crying immediately, for I would have pushed her rage button. First she’d aimed her accusing finger at God, then at herself, then me. Initially, I hadn’t minded. I’d almost welcomed it in a martyrly fashion: if it helped Katy, I could take it. But eventually it left us both exhausted and bruised. No, the rage was gone, and in its place were only guilt and pain.

Our baby was dead. Had it been someone else’s, someone I’d read about in the paper, I suppose I could have retreated into the comfort of cold philosophy. I could have played the semantics game. Was it really a baby at five months? A fetus? What? At least we still had Sarah. At least we had been spared the trauma our friends Cisco and Sheila had been forced to endure. Their son had been stillborn. What’s worse, when Sheila’s labor was induced, they knew their son was dead. Of course I’d been philosophical about it, spouting the usual bullshit about how it was better this way. What way was that? Better for whom, exactly? We haven’t seen Cisco and Sheila for over a year now.

I realized I’d been punishing myself, the way Katy had punished herself, the way she punished me. In spite of my Jewishness, I know only the guilty deserve to be punished, and even then, not always. Given the randomness of things, it’s a miracle any of us get born at all. But that knowledge doesn’t stop my mother’s words from ringing in my ears: When things are good, watch out! In the world of her creation, we were always one breath short of disaster, one nightfall away from the sun’s refusal to shine. My mom lacked perspective. Now I had all the perspective I could stand.

“Life is hard for us all.” That’s what my friend Israel Roth says. “It’s not a contest of whose life is worse. When the Gettys are sad, their misery is as real as mine or yours. Money is a retreat, not a fortress. Maybe I understand your mother, may she rest in peace, a little bit different than you. Life changes a person. Maybe she would regret some of her ways, take some things back. But she’s gone and nothing can change the dead. Just say Kaddish and move on.”

Mr. Roth, unlike me, has earned the right to be philosophical about death. The Nazi tattoo on his forearm says so.

Still, things had been good. Katy’s design business was taking off. Sarah-the smartest, most beautiful child on earth-was being two with a vengeance, but that was as it should be. City on the Vine and Bordeaux in Brooklyn, the wine shops Aaron and I owned, were booming. I had my doubts about Reaganomics, but the money seemed to be trickling down at least as far as our cash registers. What did I know about economics anyway? I voted for Jimmy Carter. Twice!

So, like I said, things had been good, were good. I wasn’t even particularly itchy anymore. I’d worked my one case as a private investigator and gotten the notion out of my system. Besides, all I’d got for my trouble was bruised kidneys and a trunk full of other people’s secrets. Who needed the grief? I had enough of my own. So I put my license back in the sock drawer with the rest of my dreams. Even the dust bunnies thought my license was a bit of a farce, a frightened man’s conceit, a hedge against the ifs in life. Then we had the miscarriage. There are no hedges.

“Come on,” I said, tugging on Katy’s hand. “Let’s go home and see Sarah, okay?”

She smiled in spite of herself. Whatever other tragedies she’d suffered, whatever regrets Katy had, there was always Sarah to go home to. Sometimes that kid of ours could be an amazing source of strength for the both of us.

“Okay, Moe,” Katy relented, standing up and smoothing out her dress. “Just give me a minute.”

As I waited outside the door, I tried imagining the face of a woman I’d never met before or even heard of until fifteen minutes ago. I wondered if her father was thinking about her at that very moment, if he had hedged against the loss of his daughter. It was a day to think about fathers and daughters.

“Where have you got to, Moira Heaton?” I mumbled under my breath.

“Did you say something?” Katy asked, reappearing at my side.

“It’s not important.”

The dappled June light smelled of fresh-cut grass and possibility. Hope and potential were easy to believe in on a sunny wedding day in June. Just as we stepped out, Constance and Craig were getting into the limo that would take them to the airport. I hadn’t thought to ask where they were headed. On a day like this, they could go anywhere. But anywhere they went, they would not remain untouched for very long. That was always the test, I thought, not how good you were at avoiding the blows, but how you dealt with them after they landed.

Chapter Two

Our precarious equilibrium had returned. I was grateful for it. Even in the previous day’s incident I could see an end to the grief in sight. Katy snapped back more quickly each time and had finally started working on some long-neglected accounts. She was down in her studio and Sarah was next door with her friend Mary. I was busy watching the second act of a twin bill slaughter of the Mets by the Astros. Macbeth had been less bloody than this, certainly more humane.

Still, I could not get Moira Heaton off my mind, nor could I get my head around Mr. Geary’s cryptic lecture about the art of golf. Considering my history, I understood my fascination with Moira. Geary was a different story. All my life I’d been told that rich people were different. Of course, having grown up in the ass end of Brooklyn, my concept of rich was somewhat skewed. To me, a kid who had his own room and no hand-me-downs was like a king. People who owned their own homes and two cars … Forget about it! Both college and the job had expanded my horizons some, but not as much as you’d think.

Until Aaron and I opened our first shop on Columbus Avenue five years ago, I never really dealt with people of any significant means. Black or white, Jew or gentile, clean or corrupt, almost everyone I had contact with up until then was in the same boat as me. Some sat at the captain’s table, some traveled in steerage. Nevertheless, it was the same boat. So I understood them. I was them. I didn’t get men like Geary. What allure could some political hack hold for Geary? How rich was rich enough? I couldn’t help but remember my father’s pitiful mantra: If I could only put twenty grand together … That was my dad’s problem; he dreamed small and failed big.

There wasn’t a thing I could do or wanted to do about Geary except wait for his call. Moira Heaton, on the other hand, may have been missing, but not from the public record. Unfortunately, the parts of the public record I wanted to see were behind the beige brick walls and locked doors of the Sheepshead Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I tried thinking back to Thanksgiving Eve of ‘81.

I had been a little too preoccupied to have paid much attention to the news of Moira Heaton’s disappearance in those weeks. Thanksgiving Eve 1981 was the night Arthur Rosen hanged himself. Rosen had tried to hire me to look into the death of his sister Karen. Fair enough, but there were these two minor sticking points: Arthur was as mad as a March hare, and Karen, a high school classmate of mine, was one of seventeen workers who had perished in a Catskills hotel fire in 1966. I turned him down flat, throwing him unceremoniously out of the shop.

Days later, when I went to apologize, I found Arthur’s body, his neck in a belt, and my name scrawled in blood on his bedroom wall. It was just my name, but it felt like an accusation. I changed my mind and took the case. Maybe too late to do Arthur any good, but not too late for me. I spent the next week or so up in the Catskills.