Commonwealth(37)
She laid the jacket on top of his coat and then leaned down for his shoes. Leo Posen had lovely lace-up shoes, polished and worn soft as gloves. She put them far enough away from the bed that he wouldn’t trip on them in the night. Then she picked his feet up off the floor and put them in the bed with the rest of him, turning him around in the process. The pants, the belt, she didn’t even consider them.
“Next time I’ll know,” he said, sinking into all that softness, cool sheets, warm blankets.
She put her hand on his shoulder just to call him back for a moment. “Sleep well,” she said. She made her voice as soft as the pillows because now that this was over and he was safely in bed she could love him again. She covered him up.
“You can stay for a while, can’t you?” There was no embarrassment there, only peace, only enough time left to ask for one more favor, which Franny thought was the deepest difference between women and men. His eyes were closed and by the end of the sentence he was asleep, and so she said nothing. She pulled the spread over him and turned off the lamp, then she sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, on the far far side, and changed her shoes. She kept a pair of flats in her bag. The soles of her work shoes had only touched the carpet of the hotel and so they were as good as new. She would have them for years.
*
Had anyone asked Fix Keating and Bert Cousins what they agreed on, neither man would have been able to come up with much of a list. Still, without ever having discussed the matter (without ever having discussed any matter) they had both decided that Caroline and Franny should go to law school. The girls were very young when this idea first took hold, Caroline was in middle school and Franny still sleeping with dolls, but Fix and Bert had mapped out the future like generals in their separate camps. Neither Caroline nor Franny exhibited any interest in American history. They were not particularly given to rational thought. They showed no skills at debate, though their energy for screaming at one another was limitless. But then again it wasn’t about what either man had seen in Caroline or Franny. It was about what each had seen in himself.
Bert held similar expectations for all the children in the family, even Jeanette, who he thought could at least do title searches if she ever made it through school. By expecting the same thing of everyone he saw himself as fair-minded and devoid of favoritism, and by coming up with a plan so many years before it would need to be implemented he figured he was bound to have at least some measure of success. The law, after all, was what Cousinses did. Bert’s great-grandfather had been a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his grandfather had been a circuit court judge. Bert’s father, William Cousins, called Bill, had practiced a gentleman’s version of real estate law out of substantial offices in downtown Charlottesville, mostly drawing up contracts for friends who bought swaths of Virginia farmland, waited for the zoning to change, and then turned the land into strip malls. It was a good source of income from which Bill retired early, his wife having come into the Coca-Cola bottling rights for half of the commonwealth through the bequest of her childless uncle. Bill Cousins liked to stand in his living room and look out the front window, down the allée of noble sycamores that lined the drive, and think the world was beautiful and should never change.
Bert held a Jeffersonian belief that a basic understanding of the law was the foundation for any successful life, so even if one of the children wanted to be a nurse or teach school he expected they should secure law degrees first. His belief that a person without an understanding of the law could actually be intelligent or interesting had been a problem in both of his marriages.
Fix’s take on the law was more straightforward: he wanted his girls to be lawyers because lawyers made money. If Caroline and Franny made money themselves there would be a smaller chance that they would one day leave the guy they were married to for a guy who was rich. Fix was a great believer in history repeating itself, and he never tried to dress it up as anything else. If it happened once, it could damn well happen again.
The year that Caroline was thirteen and Franny was ten, Fix bought them each a Kaplan study guide to the LSAT. He wrapped them up in red foil paper and mailed them to Virginia for Christmas along with the regular presents that Marjorie had picked out: board games, a stuffed rabbit, a watercolor set, a sweater, two music boxes.
“It’s a little crazy but it’s not a bad idea,” Bert said, picking up Franny’s copy while she scratched around in the piles of crumpled wrapping paper, searching for some overlooked present that might have gotten lost under the tree.
“Are you serious?” Beverly said. She was wearing a zip-up floor-length robe of dark-green velour, a homemade Christmas present from her own mother. On any other mother in the world it would have looked dumpy, but on their mother it was startlingly chic.
“If they read one chapter a month,” Bert said, flipping through to the index, “that wouldn’t be too much. They don’t have to understand it. At this point it would just be a matter of familiarizing themselves with the vocabulary, but if they really stuck with the program they’d wind up with perfect scores someday.” He had yet to articulate his own plans to raise up an entire firm of lawyers, but he saw Fix’s initiative as a good place to start.
Caroline, in her red-flannel reindeer pajamas and fluffy socks, was torn between the desire to tell Bert to go fuck himself and remembering that the gift was from her father. She decided she would look at the book later when Bert wasn’t around to take any pleasure in seeing her do it. Franny on the other hand was just now opening the hardback copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from her grandmother. Even from the first sentence, from the look of the words on the page, she could tell that that was what she would be reading over Christmas vacation, not an LSAT prep book. But when their father called later that morning to wish them a merry Christmas and to tell them he missed them more than anything in the world and wished that they could all be together (which made the girls cry on their separate extension phones, Caroline in the kitchen, Franny sitting on the floor beside the bed in Bert and her mother’s room), he also broke the news that he had gotten into law school. Starting in January, Fix Keating would be attending Southwestern College of Law at night. Going at night meant it would take four years instead of three, but that was okay, that was the way Dick Spencer had done it. He wished he’d started earlier, the way Dick had, but you can’t spend your life regretting things.