Alternate Side(31)

“The golf club attack.”

“You lost me, Non.” Nora was relieved. At least Jack, Ricky, and the block had not gone completely national. Nora narrated the story, and because it was Christine, she also told her she thought Jack’s version was a self-serving lie and that it would serve him right to go to jail.

“Isn’t Jack Fisk that really obnoxious man with the loud voice?” Christine said. “He was yelling at his wife because she was going to make them late for a restaurant reservation or something?”

“He’s horrible,” Nora said.

“Ya think?” Christine said.

“Mrs. Alma wants you to call her,” Charity said.

“Mrs. Fenstermacher wants me to call?” Nora asked.

“What I said.”

“Obviously I chose a bad weekend to visit the grandchildren,” Alma Fenstermacher said, pouring tea. Nora should have known that when Alma invited you to tea, it wasn’t boiling water and a bag in a mug. There were individual single strainers, tiny cucumber sandwiches, scones, and clotted cream. It reminded Nora of the tea she’d once had at a hotel in Oxford. “The Randolph,” Alma said when Nora said it aloud. “The best afternoon tea in the British Isles. Sometimes we take the train from London just to walk around the colleges and have tea there.”

Nora realized that what had happened on the block was monumental if the Fenstermachers wanted details. Alma never gossiped, never stood with her dog on the pavement and muttered, “Did you hear what those new people are doing to the backyard of Four forty-five?” Nora described what she’d seen, and Alma sighed and said, “I’m sorry it came to that. I hope Ricky’s injury is not too terrible. We never used him much, but he seemed like a lovely man.” Nora had noticed that the Fenstermachers rarely used Ricky, but she assumed that that was because nothing in their house ever broke.

She also assumed they never read the tabloids. The Times, The Wall Street Journal—neither had written about what had happened, but the tabloids had sunk their pointed teeth into it and wouldn’t let go. Part of that was bad timing. Two weeks before, the police had stopped a man in upper Manhattan and shot him six times after, they said, he pulled a gun from his pocket. The gun turned out to be a cellphone; there had been a demonstration on 125th Street at which thousands of people had held their phones in the air. An accident at the George Washington Bridge, caused in part by the traffic occasioned by the demonstration, had resulted in the paralysis of a mother of three from Westchester County.

The Smoking Phone story, as the Post had termed it, had run out of steam several days before. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and so did the tabloids. Their block was such an easy and convenient target. Had none of them ever noticed that everyone who lived there, every single one, even the renters, was white, and that everyone who worked for them, every single one, was black or Latino? Nora remembered telling her sister that when she had advertised for a nanny, not a single applicant was white. “So, wait, you were worried when you hired Charity because you somehow thought it was racist to offer a black woman a good job?” Christine had said. “Does that make any sense? Especially if she wants the job?”

“All the nannies are black and all the children are white. Does that make any sense?”

“I guess kind of,” Christine said. “Charity is an immigrant, right? Immigrants work hard for us to someday get to be us. Someday their children will be hiring nannies of their own. Besides, if these women need the work, who are you to second-guess them? That’s racist for sure.”

“So you have lots of people of color working for your company?”

There was a silence. “Well, it’s a smallish business,” Christine finally said.

“So that would be a no?”

“Are we counting Asians?”

“No,” Nora said.

“Why are you suddenly worrying about this?” Christine asked. “This is like the time your lunch group had that big discussion about whether it was wrong to call Charity your housekeeper instead of the housekeeper.”

(“I don’t understand why,” Suzanne had said. “I call Hal Bancroft my lawyer and Dr. Cohen my gynecologist.”

“My trainer,” said Jean-Ann.

“My waxer,” said Elena.

“Your waxer?” Jenny said.

“You blondes have no idea,” Elena said.

“Honestly, Nora, I love you, but you’re overthinking this,” said Jean-Ann.)

“Or,” Christine added, “that time you called Charity an African-American and she got huffy and said she wasn’t African, she was Jamaican, and you raised her salary by fifty dollars a week because you felt guilty.”

“I’m just trying to be a good person here!” Nora cried.

“First of all, you are a good person. And second of all, what does any of this have to do with being a good person? And third of all, I think you pay Charity more than most of our designers here make.”

“The haves vs. the have-nots,” the Post said. “The deadly dead end.” Charity was annoyed at being described as a have-not. Charlie kept complaining that deadly suggested Ricky had been killed. He was also annoyed by the Daily News, which had come up with a picture of Jack at a golf course somewhere, with the headline WELCOME TO THE CLUB!

“That’s not even the club he was carrying,” Charlie said at breakfast, when he saw it.