feelings on paper,” I said.
“I talked him into it exactly once,” she admitted. “He used initials, not names. It reads ‘M., I love you absolutely. B.’”
I wondered if Hazel had crosschecked the dates of my mother’s travel with Ben’s various board meetings, which she marked with line drawings of fish in her calendar.
“Anything else?” I asked.
What followed was a silence so long that I thought my mother had put down the receiver.
“Six Polaroids,” Malabar finally said. “I promised Ben that I would destroy them, but I never did.”
“How bad are they?”
“Very.”
So Hazel had seen a full dossier on my mother and Ben’s love affair.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?”
“I don’t think so,” my mother said. I heard paper shuffling. “No. Nothing’s missing. It’s all here.”
* * *
Our plan was this: My mother would tell Hazel she needed at least a week to get the money together. During that time, we would finalize every detail of our operation. My mother, pretending to be Hazel, would send letters to a handful of married friends who ran in Lily’s circle, including Ben’s two sisters, alleging that Malabar was having affairs with their husbands. Our hope was that in the tsunami of preposterous accusations of infidelity, the real one would get lost, a ripple in a vast ocean.
I skipped classes for several days.
Over the phone, Malabar and I struggled for the perfect opening phrase. We decided that there was no good way to soft-pedal an adultery accusation, so we settled on I regret to inform you. Paragraph two varied from woman to woman but essentially introduced specifics and provided a scenario: Malabar was seen with your husband leaving the Four Seasons Hotel . . . There are receipts for a weekend flight to New York . . . A photo of your husband and Malabar was found in her bedside table. The closing lines required the greatest consideration. Hazel needed to appear to be making her case, but at the same time there had to be a flaw in the scenario she presented, a refutable fact that would undermine the credibility of her accusation. We accomplished this by selecting a date on which we knew the purported lover had an ironclad alibi—a major family occasion, such as a birthday or anniversary—that made it impossible for him to have participated in the alleged tryst.
Malabar drafted, redrafted, and polished these letters, imitating Hazel’s handwriting. She read them aloud to me over the phone, and if she had any doubts about the final product, she redid the letter. When they were all finished, she tucked them into envelopes and drove around Boston and Cambridge and Newton, mailing each from a different post office.
As the phone calls came in from various shocked friends, I could picture Malabar in her kitchen, leaning against the wall for support as she held the receiver. She would likely be nervous at first, but I knew my mother would find her groove quickly. The plan was for her to act like she’d been fielding these calls for days.
Can you believe it? I imagined Malabar saying as she roped the phone cord around her long, elegant fingers. I’m so sorry that this caused you even a moment of distress.
There’d be a pause as the friend asked more questions.
Oh yes. I fired her last week, Malabar would continue earnestly. But honestly, who knows the extent of the damage?
And then more back-and-forth.
It’s been a nightmare not knowing who else she has written to and who might believe her lies. Clearly, she wants to destroy my reputation, although it’s also conceivable that she’s just plain crazy.
Finally, with the chitchat over, Malabar would be in a good position to ask for the big favor. Claiming to be overwhelmed by all the damage control she was undertaking—canceling credit cards, reviewing bank statements, fielding all these phone calls—she would ask the friend if she’d mind calling Lily and telling her what had happened, professing concern that Lily might have gotten a letter too. Malabar knew that it would take only a couple such calls for Lily to conclude that if she heard anything from Hazel, it had to be a hoax.
With each phone call, I imagined, my mother would become more and more in her element, exuding confidence and charisma.
It would be funny if only poor Charles weren’t so mortified. When I checked her references, no one mentioned that Hazel was as mad as a hatter! Malabar might be laughing. A dozen lovers, all these dinners and trips .