A Week as Andrea Benstock Read online

  A Week as Andrea Benstock

  By Lawrence Block

  Writing as Jill Emerson

  FOR

  JOSEPH ROSENBERG AND IN MEMORY

  OF PEGGY ROTH

  Contents

  Sunday May 12, 1963

  Monday September 21, 1964

  Tuesday April 5, 1966

  Wednesday October 16, 1968

  Thursday April 16, 1970

  Friday December 15, 1972

  Saturday May 10, 1975

  A New Afterword by the Author

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Sunday

  May 12, 1963

  ON the second Sunday in May, 1963, Andrea Beth Kleinman awoke to the sound of rain on her bedroom window. It was a comforting sound, and after she had looked around long enough to establish that it was light outside, she closed her eyes again and settled .her head on her pillow. Soon enough it would be time to get out of bed and shower and dress for what was supposed to be the most important day of her life. But first she would steal a few moments of that day for herself, lying snug in her own warmth and listening to the rain.

  It occurred to her, after a few moments, that this would be a day of doing things for the last time. The process had already begun; this was the last morning she would wake up alone. Tomorrow she would be in Puerto Rico, a married woman, and Mark would be beside her. She would not be Andrea Kleinman but Andrea Benstock, and that seemed as vast a difference as between Buffalo and Puerto Rico.

  Of course they would return to Buffalo. But she would not sleep again in this bed, in this house.

  The house was a square brick structure on Admiral Road four doors from Starin Avenue. It was on the north side of Buffalo Just a few blocks from the Kenmore line. The house had been built shortly after the conclusion of the First World War, and had been occupied by the Kleinman family since midway through the Second World War. Her father had purchased it in 1942 for eighty-seven hundred dollars. A year later the real estate market went crazy and realtors offered David Kleinman as much as fifteen thousand. He had not considered selling then, nor did he consider it in the late fifties, when the exodus of Jewish families from that neighborhood to smaller houses in the suburbs began in earnest.

  It was the only home Andrea remembered. She had been four years old when they moved in, and had previously lived in an apartment on Amherst near Elmwood and the upper half of a two-family house on Norwalk. She had the usual complement of amorphous memories of those first four years, but there was no sense of place to them. Home to her had always been this house on Admiral Road, and, within that house, this bedroom of hers.

  For thirteen years she had lived here with no interruption beyond family vacations and a few summers at Canadian camps. During the years at Bryn Mawr, even during the years in New York, this had remained her home if only because she had had no other. Whenever she came home on a visit her room was waiting for her, her own room in the house in which she had grown up, and it was only in retrospect that she realized how much this pleased her.

  Now she recalled a telephone conversation which had taken place on another Sunday a few years ago. She was in New York at the time, newly settled in her apartment on Jane Street. Her parents called for the traditional Sunday morning conversation, her father on the sun-room extension, her mother at the wall phone in the kitchen. They had looked at a house the day before, her mother said, and it was perfect in every way. A ranch house, small and easy to care for, all built-ins in the kitchen, and on a very good street in Snyder.

  “Much closer to the club for his golf. Fifteen minutes shorter each way. And no stairs to climb. I thought if I could finally get him to look at a house, and this was just perfect for our needs.”

  “It was a nice little house,” her father agreed.

  “So it’s nice, and it’ll go on being nice, and somebody else will buy it and live in it. He won’t move.”

  “It suits me here, Andrea. It’s closer to my office, which I still go to more often than I play golf, but even if it wasn’t. Maybe I’m crazy but I’m comfortable here. I don’t want to go get used to someplace else.”

  At the time she had sympathized more with her mother’s position. The neighborhood was declining, in property value if not in physical appearance. They were alone, the two of them. They didn’t need all that space, nor did they need a staircase to go up and down a dozen times a day.

  Then eight months ago she had returned to this house, to this room. And how glad she had been for her father’s stubbornness. Of course there would have been a room for her in whatever house they might have bought, but it would not have been her room, nor would any new house have been her house.

  This was her neighborhood, each house on the block well remembered, its familiarity precious however many of the old neighbors were gone. School 66 was still around the corner, and its presence was no less reassuring for all that her teachers were retired or dead. In the fall, before she began seeing Mark, she had spent some time almost every day walking slowly through these streets. She would not have walked like that in Snyder.

  Now she listened to the rain on her window and put off getting out of her own bed for the final time. Suddenly the thought touched her in a way she had not anticipated, and she began to cry. She felt unutterably foolish but still the tears flowed. She put her face in her pillow and wept.

  After her shower she put on a blouse and a pair of jeans and went downstairs. Her mother was at the breakfast table with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette. She said, “You certainly picked a fine day for a wedding. It’s supposed to be like this all day.”

  “It’s good we didn’t decide on an outdoor ceremony.”

  “You weren’t thinking of it, were you? You never said anything about it.”

  “I was just joking.”

  “Because I never liked the whole idea of outdoor weddings. I suppose I’m old-fashioned. I went to one two years ago that you wouldn’t believe. Did I tell you about it? Sylvia Friedkin’s daughter Margie. I don’t know if you knew her. She’s a few years younger than you.”

  “Everybody’s a few years younger than I am.”

  “It was one for the books. The groom was a non-Jewish boy, so the service was nondenominational. Fine. But they held it in Delaware Park.”

  “It’s beautiful in the park.”

  “It’s lovely, but this was the middle of August and the temperature was over ninety for a week solid. And the lake there has no drainage, and you haven’t been around much in the past few years, but you no longer have to be right in the middle of the lake to realize that there’s no drainage. And the particular place they picked, for some nondenominational reason I’m sure, was close enough to Delaware Avenue so that you had a spectacular view of Forest Lawn with tombstones rising in the distance.”

  “Oh.”

  “Someone said this would be very convenient if the father of the bride had a stroke. You remember Joe Friedkin. He always looks as though he’s about to have a stroke, with that red face of his, and between the heat and his new son-in-law no one was too sure that he could last the day. The groom had grown a beard, which I suppose is all right, except in this particular case he wasn’t that good at growing beards, nebbish, and there were great hairless areas on his face as if he’d been struck by some form of blight. Your father thought possibly ringworm. You’re laughing, but you didn’t have to stand there in the heat and put up with all of this. You didn’t, have to listen to the nondenominational clergyman talk about living in harmony with Nature. God knows where they found him. He was barefoot, incidentally, like the bride and groom. I somehow forgot to mention that. They wanted to be able to absorb the essence of the planet through their toes. There used to
be a bridle path there, bridle as in horses, not weddings, and your father said they stood a fairly good chance of absorbing the essence of hookworm between their toes. Ringworm and hookworm, that was the sort of thing that came to mind. Sit down and I’ll get your breakfast. What do you want?”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “Well, you’ve got a big day. Just the family at the wedding, but the reception and running for the plane. You ought to have something.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “Sit. In a few hours you’ll be a married woman and you can get your own breakfast for the rest of your life. And Mark’s, and before long you won’t remember what it is to sit down. Could you eat some French toast?”

  “I’ll force myself. Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s in the sun-room reading the Times. The Courier’s right in front of you if you want to read something. Three pieces of French toast?”

  “Two’s plenty.”

  She was drinking her second cup of coffee and smoking her first cigarette when the telephone rang. Her mother answered it. After a moment she said, “Well, I don’t know. It’s bad luck for you to see her before the ceremony. Do you suppose you’re allowed to talk to her? They didn’t have telephones when they invented the superstition so I’m not sure how it works. Well, I’ll see if she’ll take a chance on you.” She covered the mouthpiece with the palm of her hand. “It’s Mark,” she said.

  “No kidding.”

  She took the phone. He said, “How are you holding up?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Oh, it’s business as usual here. The old man’s running around shouting because his tie had a spot on it, my mother’s crying a lot, and Jeff and Linda aren’t speaking.”

  “To anyone?”

  “To each other. How are things at your end?”

  “Very calm. Daddy’s in the sun-room reading the paper and Mother’s screening all my calls.”

  “Very funny,” her mother said.

  “The reason I called. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t come to your senses and decided to call the whole thing off.”

  “‘You say either and I say eye-ther.’ Why? Getting cold feet?”

  “Warmest feet in town. I thought you might be having second thoughts, though, and I figured I’d talk you out of them.”

  “I’m having nothing but first thoughts.”

  “Happy ones?”

  “Very happy ones.”

  “Still love me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Some other time, okay?”

  “Because your mother’s there? She knows you love me, honey. That’s why you’re marrying me.”

  “I’ll see you in, oh, just a couple hours, isn’t it? I’d better think about getting dressed.”

  “You won’t say it, huh?”

  “You idiot. I love you. And I’ll see you in a little while.”

  Her father was in his chair in the sun-room. The room had been an open porch when the house was originally constructed, but well before the Kleinmans bought it the porch had been completely enclosed so that it functioned as a second living room. It was a good place for reading, light and airy with large casement windows in front and on both sides.

  David Kleinman was doing the crossword puzzle when Andrea entered the room. He finished penciling in a word, then lowered the paper and smiled gently at her over its top. “Going to get dressed now?”

  “I thought I’d sit with you for a minute.”

  “Well, in that case,” he said. He put down the paper as she seated herself on the love seat opposite him.

  “You’re beautiful today,” he said. “All brides are beautiful, but you’re something special.”

  He was a handsome man, she thought. He was not tall, although she always thought of him as taller than his actual height and was invariably surprised when he stood at her side. He was fifty-seven years old and she thought that he had aged well. She had seen pictures of him as a young man. It seemed to her that he was a more attractive man now than he had been in his youth. His strong features, the prominent nose and deep-set eyes, were more at home in a more mature face. He still had all his hair, and it was a fine iron-gray color which suited him and contrasted strikingly with the still-black eyebrows.

  And he was still slender. Her mother, too, had kept her figure, and that really made all the difference in the world. Mark’s parents were both quite a bit overweight, and as a result the Benstocks looked considerably older than the Kleinmans, although they were in fact all about the same age.

  She would not permit herself to gain weight, she decided. And she would make sure Mark did not grow fat.

  “Today’s the day,” her father said. “Now there’s an original thought, but it’s hard to know what else to say. I’m very happy for you, baby.”

  “Oh, Daddy.”

  “I’ll tell you something. I think you’re getting a hell of a guy. I was fully prepared to detest Mark, but he turned out to be as impossible to dislike as any man I ever met. He’s solid and dependable. He’s got a good future, he’s with a good firm and they think a lot of him.”

  “I’m glad you like him.”

  “Why should you care about that? To be frank about it, why should it matter how I feel? Or how your mother feels? Oh, I grant that it makes for a lot less friction this way, but it’s not the most important thing in the world. Your grandmother Levine is still not too sure about me. Well, God bless her, she’s not too sure about anything these days. If my mind ever gets like that, do me a favor and shoot me, okay?”

  “Oh, don’t talk like that.”

  “Anyway, I like him. Why in the hell shouldn’t I? He’s got a nice small family. His sister lives out in Arizona so there’s just his mother and his father and his brother in college, and his mother already has a set of false teeth so how much trouble can she be? You could have picked somebody with a roomful of cousins all of them needing root canal work. I’m getting off cheap.”

  “I’m a considerate daughter.”

  “Yes, you are. I wonder if you’re too considerate. Tell me something now that it’s too late to change. Didn’t you really want a big wedding?”

  “Absolutely not. Mark and I agreed completely on that point. Just the family, the immediate family. In fact—”

  “In fact you could live without us too? Don’t apologize. I see no reason why a wedding should be a family occasion. Not that wild horses could keep me from yours, but as far as the point of view of the bridal couple. I thought you honestly wanted to keep it small myself, but your mother had the idea that you might have wanted to take it easy on my bank account. Well. May I ask another foolish question? Do you have any hesitation whatsoever about going through with this today?”

  “None.”

  “Because it is a good deal easier to get out of a marriage before the wedding than after it. Sometimes people find themselves trapped into going through with something because they think it’s expected of them.”

  “It’s not that, Daddy.”

  “You’re absolutely sure in your mind.”

  “Yes.”

  “You love Mark?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He looked at her for a moment. “Mark loves you very much.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “In every marriage there is one partner who loves more intensely, more thoroughly, than the other. There’s nothing noble about loving more. It’s in the way people are and the way they operate with one another. I don’t honestly know which it’s better to be, the one who loves the most or the one who is loved the most.”

  He seemed about to say more, so she waited, but that was all he said. Finally she said, “I love Mark very much, Daddy. Very much.”

  “He’ll be a good husband for you. I’m happy for both of you. You know, I was never worried about you, Andrea.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Your mother used to worry. From time to time. But I always somehow knew that you would b
e all right. I’ve always found it easy to understand you. Probably because I feel that you and I are similar. Also different, very different, but in some ways quite similar.” He looked up at her and broke the mood with a quick smile. “You have to get dressed. So do I, come to think of it.”

  She gave him a kiss, then went up to her room. She thought on the way of what he had just told her. That her mother loved him more intensely than he loved her.

  Well, she had always known that. As she had always known that Mark’s love for her was somehow deeper and stronger than hers for him.

  At eleven o’clock she went downstairs again. Her father looked quite elegant in a black mohair suit. “I thought brides took forever to dress,” he said. “We don’t have to leave for an hour yet. Your mother is busy making every minute count.”

  “I have to go out for a minute.”

  “What for? It’s still pouring.”

  “I thought I’d run over to Van Slyke’s. I want to get something new. These shoes are old and I borrowed Mom’s diamond chip earrings and the dress is blue—”

  “The dress is also new.”

  “It seems cheating to use one thing for both. I’ll just get something.”

  “You’ll also get out of the house. Fair enough. Take my car, it’s out front.”

  She was able to park right in front of the drug store. It was raining lightly and she hurried inside and went directly to the telephone booth. She dropped the dime in the slot, then realized that she could not remember his number. It had been at least a year since she called him last, but there had been a time when his number seemed permanently filed in her mind. She dialed New York Information and asked for the number of John Riordan, on Perry Street.

  The operator supplied the number. Then she started to place the call before deciding that it wouldn’t do to call collect. She got a couple of dollars’ worth of change and returned to the booth, only to find that she had already forgotten the number. She got it from Information again and dialed it, and he answered on the third ring.