A Week as Andrea Benstock Read online

  “Andrea, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  She looked up at him. He was standing but he was so very far away and there was a fog between them that blurred his features. She opened her mouth again and made herself breathe, in and out, in and out. He was talking but the words wouldn’t cut their way through the fog.

  “Andrea—”

  Her own voice, now, returned to her as from a distance. She seemed to understand her own words only by hearing them.

  She said, “Winkie is dead. Winkie.”

  He was moving toward her. She tried to extend the Alumnae Bulletin to him. Her arm stretched far out from her body but her fingers couldn’t maintain their grip on the paper and it fell, fell so slowly toward the floor.

  Then the fog got thicker and covered everything.

  In her first year at Bryn Mawr Andrea had shared a room in the freshman dormitory with a girl named Pauline Spooner. Pauline’s father was a Unitarian minister in Three Rivers, Delaware, and Pauline was assistant freshman coordinator of a campus organization called Liberal Religious Youth. She was tall and stoop-shouldered and had bad skin and went out on infrequent dates with a young man from Haverford who looked enough like her to have been her brother. At first Pauline had found Andrea very interesting on account of her being Jewish. “I’ve always hoped for an opportunity to talk with Jewish people,” she’d said. “I hope it’s not a sensitive subject with you?”

  Andrea hadn’t thought it was.

  “Then tell me this. Do you often feel aware of an enormous inner void in your soul resulting from your denial of Christ?”

  They were not destined to become close, and Pauline did not return to Bryn Mawr the following year. In the course of her first year Andrea met and became friendly with the two girls with whom she was to share rooms for her remaining three years. They were Dana Giddings and Winifred Welles.

  Dana was from a suburb of Boston. She was of old Massachusetts stock on both sides and her father was a partner in a Boston advertising agency. Dana was a very slender girl with deeply set dark eyes and a manner of quiet assurance. She had entered as a political science major but changed her major to history midway through her second year. An attractive girl, there was nothing striking about her beauty, perhaps because her shy manner did nothing to call attention to it. She had a dry acerbic wit which was commonly expressed in an undertone audible only to those in close proximity to her.

  For three years Dana had never dated the same boy more than twice. She was not unpopular, and it was hard to know whether she actively discouraged boys from developing relationships with her or whether her aloofness somehow put them off. She seemed content enough. Then, in the fall of their senior year, Dana met a graduate assistant in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania. She met him on a Friday and was not seen again until the following Monday.

  Andrea was alone in their apartment when Dana returned. “Thank God,” she said. “We were trying to decide whether to call the police. Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious.”

  “How often do you two stay away for a weekend?”

  “But that’s us. You never stayed away like that. You had us worried. I’m not kidding.”

  “We’re going to be married in June,” Dana said quietly, matter-of-factly. “He’s from New Mexico. He says I’ll like it out there.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I suspect he’s right,” she said.

  Andrea thought of any number of remarks and didn’t make any of them, and in June Dana was married and went to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  That was Dana Giddings. And Winifred Welles was Winkie.

  Remembering Winkie:

  “Hey, Kleinman? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Alive.”

  “Seriously. Here we are with all these roads stretching out in front of us and I get to wondering if maybe they all lead to Rome.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Well, what if whatever we do we wind up in exactly the same place? Or to put it another way. How would you like to wake up one fine morning and discover you have turned out to be a road company version of your mother?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s anything to worry about. Anyway, my mother’s all right.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t. I’d like nothing better than to trade mothers with you. I’ll throw in the good ten of diamonds and my pearl ring. That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Well, you don’t want to grow up to be your mother, do you? Oh, I’m not coming across, am I?” Head cocked to one side, eyes (blue now, but sometimes they verged on green) glinting under uneven never-plucked brows. “I don’t mean you’ll marry a dentist, and don’t interrupt, I’m not criticizing dentists, but I don’t mean you might marry one, or that you’ll wind up in a house on Admirable Road—”

  “Admiral Road.”

  “Whatever. Oh, shit, Andrea Beth. You know what it is? My awful secret?”

  “If it’s something you did after lights out at Foxcroft—”

  “Shithead!”

  “Tell me your awful secret, Winkie.”

  “Damn straight!” And then, in a little-girl voice, “I wanna be somebody. That’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “You mean famous?”

  “No, I don’t mean famous.”

  “Well, you can’t mean rich. You’re already rich.”

  “Yeah, and big hairy deal to being rich. And I know it’s easy for me to say, and that’s why I get to say it. I will tell you, Andrea Beth. I want to be somebody. But I don’t know who. And I want to do something.”

  “But you don’t know what.”

  “Yeah. I can’t even talk like this to Dana. She’d give me that number with the eyes and I’d begin to wonder if maybe I forgot how to speak my mother tongue. You think I’m crazy too but at least I can talk to you. But you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I don’t mean a meaningful career. Shit, the last thing I want is a meaningful career. Doesn’t this get to you, Kleinman? Where you could spend hours staring at the wall and looking at your future and it’s all these roads leading to Rome?”

  “I don’t know.” Pause. “I guess not.”

  “You know what I’ll do? I’ll trade selves with you, and I’ll throw in the ten of diamonds and the deuce of spades and my pearl ring and all my cashmere sweaters and two Princeton boys and that schmuck from Villanova, who incidentally called again.”

  “I told you he would.”

  “Uh-huh. God, I wish I was Jewish. Can I be Jewish, Andrea Beth? Please?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Well, I guess a person can convert. People do when they get married.”

  “I don’t want to get married. If I get married maybe I’ll marry a Jew but who cares because I’m not going to get married. And I don’t mean converting. I don’t want any religion, for Christ’s sake. Hey, did you catch that one? ’For Christ’s sake.’ I like that.”

  “If you were Jewish you couldn’t say that.”

  “I could live without it. I wanna be Jewish. Please?”

  “But how can you be Jewish without the religion?”

  “You’re Jewish, right? And you’re about as religious as I’m Episcopalian, right?”

  “That’s different.”

  “That’s the whole point, you dumb Jewess. That’s the whole point!”

  “Wink, I’m beginning to think maybe you’re crazy.”

  “Well, I know that, silly. But what I want is to be a Jew the way you are and screw the religious part.” She sighed theatrically. “But it’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “I couldn’t go out and get circumcised or something like that, could I?”

  “Idiot.”

  “Well, you ought to be able to, dammit. I don’t want to wake up one morning and there I am being my goddamn stupid shithead mother, a
nd I don’t want to be Bette Davis, and what other choices have I got?”

  “Where did Bette Davis come from?”

  “Oh, you know. In all those movies with the bitchy career girl who makes it in a man’s world but her blood dries up along the way. You remember all those movies, don’t you, daahling?”

  “Of course I do, daahling.”

  “So that’s the point and—hey, I know what I’ll do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, ask me, huh?”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “I’ll be Pope. Hah! Got you that time, Kleinman. We got to keep laughing, right? Right?”

  Things swam back into focus. Mark was saying her name. She was on the sofa, her arms folded over her breasts, and he was at her side, half seated, half crouching, his hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  “Are you sure? You scared hell out of me.”

  “Did I pass out?”

  “I don’t think so. You just seemed to go blank for a minute there. There wasn’t very much time involved. Baby, are you sure you’re all right?”

  She nodded. “My mouth’s all dry.”

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  “I can get it myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She sat there, still hugging herself, while he went to the kitchen and returned with a tall glass of cool water. She drank it all down in little birdlike sips, pausing to glance up at his broad face. When the glass was empty he asked if she felt better and she assured him that she did.

  “I’m going to call Lerner,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t do that. I feel fine, honest I do.” She cupped a hand over her abdomen. “Everything’s fine here, Mark. You don’t lose a baby by emotional shock. It only happens that way in the movies. If I fell down or something, but I was sitting right here the whole time, wasn’t I?”

  “Just let me call him.”

  She waited while he made the call from the kitchen. When he had confirmed what she had said herself, it was her turn to make some telephone calls. She didn’t know where to start, who to call first. The Alumnae Bulletin didn’t tell you anything, really, “It is with deep sadness that we report the death in New York City on July 17th of Winifred Crispin Welles. At the time of her death, Winkie was employed as an assistant features editor for Holiday Magazine. Previous positions included a stint as researcher at Time-Life, Inc.”

  That was all you had to know, really. That Winkie had lived and was gone. But you felt you had to know more.

  She was on the phone for an hour, spending most of that hour trying to reach people, and when she put the phone down finally she had learned what she now felt she had somehow known all along. Not a hit-and-run driver, not an unspeakable disease, not a mugger in Central Park. Winkie had killed Winkie.

  When she put the phone down for the last time she turned to tell Mark what she had learned. But he’d overheard enough of the conversation. “You’d better sit down,” he told her. She said she was all right but she sat down anyway. He made her a drink and told her it was just what the doctor ordered. “Literally. ’Give her a big drink and tell her to take things a little easier.’ Here’s your big drink. And please take things easier.”

  “I couldn’t take things much easier.” She extended one hand, fingers separated. “God, look at me,” she said. “I’m shaking again.”

  “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been like this.”

  “Well, it’s a shock.”

  “I never knew anyone who killed themselves. I hardly ever knew anyone who died. Winkie was the first in my class. No, wait a minute, there was a girl who died of a brain tumor about six months after graduation and one a couple of years ago in an automobile accident. But I never really knew either of them. I never really experienced a death before.”

  “What about November?”

  “November? Oh, Kennedy. But I didn’t know him. You know something? That was so immediate, having a front-row seat, and now this. It happened two months ago and I never knew it until now.”

  He had picked up the Bulletin again and was scanning the notice. “It doesn’t mention a husband,” he said.

  “She wasn’t married.”

  “Winifred Crispin Welles?”

  “Crispin was her middle name. Her mother’s maiden name.”

  “There’s a custom I’ve never understood. I suppose it’s all right with a guy but with a girl it’s confusing. It makes an unmarried girl sound married.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Also, what’s the point of it? With a man it’s a way of carrying on the name from the mother’s side of the family, but with a girl she’s going to drop her middle name when she gets married.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “‘Jeremy Kleinman Benstock.’ Nothing against your name, but I’m not wildly crazy about the sound of that.”

  “I don’t think it works with Jewish names.”

  “No, I’ve got to admit it works better with something like Crispin. The goyim have a distinct advantage over us. Are you feeling any better, baby?”

  “Much better. But also worse, because it’s soaking in now. Winkie’s really dead. It’s funny, I haven’t thought of her middle name in years. Crispin. She said once that they tried to give her ’Crispy’ as a nickname at Foxcroft but it didn’t stick. I can understand why, although I don’t think I could explain it. ’Winkie’ seemed to suit her.”

  “Was she a very good friend?”

  “Well, she was the best friend I had at Bryn Mawr. There were really only two girls I was close to. Winkie and a girl named Dana Giddings. The three of us roomed together and of the two I was much closer to Winkie.”

  “You’d think they’d have been closer to each other.”

  She looked at him. “Why?”

  “Well, they were both gentile, weren’t they?”

  “Oh.”

  “Or maybe it didn’t matter.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “I wonder why she killed herself. Unless it was accidental.”

  “She took pills. Can you do that by accident?”

  The question had been rhetorical but he nodded in response. “You sure can,” he said. “It happens frequently, from what I understand. You take a couple of pills and you don’t fall asleep and then you’re so groggy you forget you’ve taken them so you take some more. Before you know it you’ve knocked off the whole bottle. And alcohol, they can combine with alcohol and it magnifies the effect. Did she drink?”

  “Everybody drank.”

  “So you can’t be sure. Unless there was a note.”

  “I don’t know if there was a note or not.”

  “Well, in that case—”

  “Look, what in the fucking hell is the difference? She wasn’t some Catholic, she’s not going to have to be buried in sacred ground. She wouldn’t have had an accident. She didn’t do things by accident.”

  “Honey—”

  “She killed herself, for God’s sake.” He looked at her and after a moment she averted her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me get dinner on the table.”

  Remembering Winkie:

  “Tell me something, Andrea Beth. Do I look positively terror-stricken?”

  Winkie at the wheel of her crippled Plymouth coupe, her long hair bound up in a scarf, eyes hidden behind large round-lensed sunglasses, one hand draped casually over the steering wheel, the other coiled in her lap.

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Are you absolutely certain of that?”

  “You know what you look like, Winks? First World War flying ace. Veteran of countless missions.”

  “Nerves of stainless steel?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “An old hand at cr
ash landings?”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it, all right. And we’re on our way to get rid of it, and I’m not flying around in my Sopwith Camel after all. I’m scared, can you believe it?”

  “Look, everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Oh, everything’s going to be sensational, Kleinman. No question about it. He’s a living legend and everybody’s favorite father figure and it would be a sin against God to go to college in Pennsylvania and not pay a single visit to the kindly old Reading rabbit-snatcher.”

  “Huh?”

  “A cunning colloquialism I read somewhere. I never actually heard anybody say it aloud. Rabbit-snatcher for abortionist. Picturesque, don’t you think? Picture a man drawing a rabbit not from a hat precisely but from a—”

  “Ugh.”

  “Quite. How much further to Reading? There was a sign back there but I didn’t see it.”

  “Neither did I. Maybe twenty miles? I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Light me a cigarette? Thanks. Tell me it’s going to be all right. No, fuck that, you already told me that. Tell me he’s going to be the compassionate dedicated abortionist in the legend.”

  “That’s what everybody says. His daughter had an illegal abortion and died and now he performs them so other people won’t have to go through it.”

  “It’s so perfect I keep gagging on it. If he winds up looking like Jean Hersholt I’m going to shit. But he’ll be terrific, right? Not your everyday dirty old man with whiskey on his breath and filth encrusted under his fingernails.” Her voice went suddenly serious. “Andrea, I’m scared shitless.”

  “Turn the car around.”

  “No.”

  “There’s no law says you have to go, Winkie. In fact the law says just the opposite. Turn the car around.”

  “I’m going through with this.”

  “But you don’t want to.”

  “But I do. Listen, it’s ridiculous, I’m twenty years old and haven’t had a single abortion yet. I mean, it’s like a secondary virginity, if you follow me. So what if I’m nervous? I was nervous when I lost the primary.”