As ever, I thank my remarkable and steadfast friends, Mameve Medwed and Stacy Schiff, for improving every chapter and for their unflagging attention to matters great and small in real life, too.
I am grateful for the kind brilliance of my editor, Andrea Schulz, and my entire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team, especially Megan Wilson and Lori Glazer.
I am immensely grateful to the Bogliasco Foundation and its Liguria Study Center for the kind of month abroad where this author and her chapters felt as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
And like a certain fictional sister with both a giant heart and a head for business, my agent extraordinaire, Suzanne Gluck, wins daily, ongoing gratitude.
And for everything a son could be, I thank Benjamin Austin.
Fort Necessity
SINCE EDWIN DIED, I have lived with my sister Margot in the Batavia, an Art Deco apartment building on beautiful West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. This arrangement has made a great deal of sense for us both: I lost my husband without warning, and Margot lost her entire life’s savings to the Ponzi schemer whose name we dare not speak.
Though we call ourselves roommates, we are definitely more than that, something on the order of wartime trenchmates. She refers to me fondly as her boarder—ironic, of course, because no one confuses a boarding house with an apartment reached via an elevator button marked PH. In a sense, we live in both luxury and poverty, looking out over the Hudson while stretching the contents of tureens of stews and soups that Margot cooks expertly and cheerfully.
She takes cookbooks out of the library and finds recipes that add a little glamour to our lives without expensive ingredients, so a pea soup that employs a ham bone might start with sautéed cumin seeds or a grilled cheese sandwich is elevated to an entrée with the addition of an exotic slaw on the plate. We mostly get along fine, and our division of labor is fair: cook and dishwasher, optimist and pessimist.
Margot has turned herself into a professional blogger—or so she likes to announce. Her main topic is the incarcerated lifer who stole all her money, and her readers were primarily her fellow victims. I use “were” instead of “are” because visitors to www.thepoorhouse.com dwindled to zero at one point. The blog produces no money and has no advertisers, but she says it is just as good for confession and self-reflection as the expensive sounding board who once was her psychoanalyst.
When asked by strangers what I do, I tell them I have something on the drawing board, hoping my mysterious tone implies Can’t say more than that. So far, it’s only a concept, one that grew out of my own social perspective. It occurred to me that there might be a niche for arranging evenings between a man and a woman who desired nothing more than companionship. The working title for my organization is “Chaste Dates.” So far, no one finds it either catchy or appealing.
Best-case scenario: I’d network with licensed matchmakers and establish reciprocity. They’d send me their timid, and I’d send them my marriage-minded. Might there be singletons with a healthy fear of intimacy versus the sin-seekers of Match.com? I hope to find them.
Everyone I’ve confided in—my younger sister, Betsy, for example, who has a job in banking in the sticky, bundling side of mortgages—hates the idea and/or tells me I’m thinking small. She’s the sister who is always alert to rank and ambition. Her husband is a lawyer who didn’t make partner, left the law, and teaches algebra in a public high school in an outer borough of New York. You’d think she’d brag about that, but she doesn’t. Occasionally I catch her telling someone that Andrew went to law school with this president or that first lady and neglecting to mention his subsequent career. I usually tell her later, “You should be proud of what he does.”
“Algebra?” she snarls, despite the fact that, unlike the progeny of a lot of New Yorkers who spend a fortune on tutors, both of her children excel in math. Edwin was a public school teacher, so I expect a little more sensitivity. These conversations push Chaste Dates further into oblivion. Still in mourning, I am easily overwhelmed.
Margot is divorced from Charles, a too-handsome, board-certified physician with an ugly story, who calls our apartment collect from his country club of a prison. He was/is a gynecologist, now under suspension, with a reckless subspecialty that drew the lonely and libidinous. Patients