Until it turned out that the child was disabled.
The day they learned how severe Joy’s cerebral palsy was, Ditmars went out drinking with his work buddies, leaving Polly home alone to weep and wonder at what she had done, what she hadn’t done, saying good-bye to every small dream she had held for her child, even dreams she never realized she had. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she had been in Marshalls and seen a pair of Mary Janes, a child’s size 5, and even though she knew it would be years before her child could wear them—and, even though she didn’t know her unborn child’s gender, at Ditmars’s insistence—she had to buy those shoes. They were $65 marked down to $7. How she had marveled at that original price, wondering what it would be like to be the kind of person who could spend $65 on shoes that a little girl might wear three, four times before growing out of them.
Five months later, the night of the diagnosis, she held those shoes to her face and wept. Maybe Joy would wear them one day, but she would never walk, not a single step. She would probably not speak, doctors said. Her body, as Polly understood it, would look the way Polly felt—twisted, stunted, useless.
When Ditmars came home and found Polly asleep at the kitchen table, that box of shoes nearby, he focused on the original price, even though the Marshalls price and the final reduction were visible. He began hitting her with the shoes, calling her a whore, saying it was her fault, that she hadn’t taken proper care of herself, that she was probably sneaking coffee and beer and God knows what else during her pregnancy. They were flimsy little leather shoes, but they hurt as he slapped her face with them. They left welts and Polly, who had long learned to hold her head high no matter the bruises or the welts or the cuts, hated those half-moon shapes on her cheeks.
Now, almost fifteen years later, that $3.3 million doesn’t seem like enough, but it wasn’t the doctor’s fault that Polly married Ditmars. That was her choice, her mistake, and she shouldered it, almost without complaint. She had tried complaining to her mother in the early years, only hinting at how badly Ditmars treated her, but her mother said, “Marriage is hard.” Now that her mother is dead, Polly feels more generously toward her—so funny how that works—and she can see her side of things. Her mother probably felt bad that she couldn’t help Polly. Just because she moved to Florida, it didn’t mean she didn’t love Polly.
Three point three million. Okay, 1.8 million. It sits, one hundred miles to the west, waiting for her in a money market account in Barry Forshaw’s name. Monday through Friday, Adam is about the same distance to the west, doing whatever it is he does. He says he has found a short-term gig as a claims adjuster. Polly can’t be bothered to ask the questions that would expose his lies. Eventually—when, why are things taking so long, why does everything she need have to take so long?—he will know he should have trusted her.
She hears Adam’s pickup truck rolling up the driveway. It’s not a bad trip, not on a Friday night in November, especially as he doesn’t leave until well after rush hour. I come to Belleville for you, I don’t want to sit around waiting for you to get off. He brings her cash, every week, to help pay the rent. She doesn’t want to take it, but she needs it. Things are so slow, her tips so small. How had Cath made it, during the winter months? Polly suspects she was skimming receipts. She wonders if she should float that idea with Mr. C as a way of making a case for a raise, but it seems mean, tainting a dead woman’s reputation.
“Hey,” Adam says, coming through the door.
“Hey.”
He picks her up, carries her to their bed. She thinks, as she often does, of the quilt, the iron bed, the kimono, back in the apartment she loved. I was happy then. She notices the tense, the wistfulness she feels toward the summer, particularly the day of the auction, when all was anticipation. Things are so complicated now. It wasn’t supposed to be this complicated. There wasn’t supposed to be an Adam. But he planted himself in her path and she can’t shake him, even though she knows she should. Eventually, he will trust her, come to see that he was wrong to doubt her.
But how can she trust him?
38
Irving seldom attends synagogue, even during the High Holidays. He doesn’t like the way people look at him. It has been twenty-plus years since he was in the news for being a slumlord, and although he knows he should be grateful that he wasn’t promoted to murderer, he still bridles at the unfairness of the term. He didn’t make his properties slums. That was on the tenants. He remembers the place where he and Birdy started out, thirty-five years ago, that terrible little apartment over near Pimlico. It was worse than anything he ever rented out, but Birdy somehow made it clean. Down on her hands and knees with Pine-Sol, every day, on those splintery floors, that curling linoleum. If they had had marble steps, she would have scrubbed those, too. The people he rented to, they didn’t have it in them to clean like that. And don’t get him started about lead paint. His first son, Eric, was born in that terrible apartment, probably licked the walls, and he went to Wharton.
But it is officially a year since Birdy’s death, so he goes to synagogue to light a yahrzeit candle, say kaddish. The rabbi smiles, hopeful.
“So maybe we’ll be seeing you here more often?” the rabbi asks. But it’s Irving’s wallet he likes, not Irving.
“Sure,” Irving says. What does it cost, a kind, assuring word? Almost nothing.
He doesn’t drive directly home after leaving shul, decides to take a trip down his own memory lane, starting with that wretched apartment near Pimlico, not far from that psychic, the neighborhood’s one constant. Then he heads north on Park Heights Avenue, as so many of his people did, first to Pikesville, then Owings Mills, then Reisterstown. Reisterstown Road—how changed it is. So many memories. He was a good husband to Birdy—an excellent provider who never loved another, although he enjoyed what he considered an essential release with the occasional woman. He and Birdy had three accomplished children, eight grandchildren. She was a firecracker, full of energy to the end. If one of the two of them was destined to have a heart attack in the middle of the night, there’s not a bookie in town who wouldn’t have said Irving was the odds-on favorite. But it was Birdy. A lot of people thought the nickname was Bertie because her name was Beatrice, but how did that make sense? She was “Birdy” because she had that aspect to her—a round, plump body, which was mostly breast, propped up on tiny stick legs. Her voice was like a bird’s, too, sweet and high.
How he loved Birdy. He cheated on her no more than three or four times, always one-offs, opportunities not to be disdained, sort of like having a slice of cake when you weren’t that hungry, but your mother-in-law kept pushing, pushing, pushing. Birdy never knew. At least, he doesn’t think she ever knew. Surely, she wouldn’t have stayed if she suspected an indiscretion on his part. She was a confident woman, sure of her worth, happy every day. The night she died, he swears he heard her giggling at her dreams.
Then—gone. And only fifty-five. Just one of those things, the doctor said.
It was about a week before she died that Irving ran into Barry Forshaw, flush with success, thanking him for the referral. How close he had come to saying, What referral? He hadn’t sent anyone to Forshaw, never would.
Was that the slip-and-fall?