The Choice: A Novel

By Robert Fedorchek

In a quiet corner of southwestern Connecticut, a secret sleeps. Now that those who would have been most affected by its disclosure are beyond hurt and embarrassment, a choice must be madebut its not the only choice Joe Ingersoll must make.

Joe, the keeper of that secret, lives in a modest home in a quiet neighborhood, thanks to his clever selection of a small parcel of land bordered by a cemetery. Now sixty-four and retired from a career in public relations, hes turned his attention to new projects, including the compilation of a dictionary of idiomatic expressions and the creation of a series of childrens books. He likes his neighborsbut secretly loves one of them. Joe longs to express his love, but he fears rejection.

At forty-six, Sally Stobbs is doing her best to rebuild her sanity, self-respect, and optimism following a painful divorce. Her friendship with Joe is on the verge of evolving into something more, and she must now choose to follow her instincts or allow the pain of a failed marriage to ruin her future. Joe awakens a new love in her, and she readily agrees to wait for him to commitbut something seems to be holding him back.

When he does reveal his secret to her, it only draws them closer. Sally insists on being by his side when he reveals his decision, his choice, to the young mother he has loved from afar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475983548

Robert Fedorchek

Robert Fedorchek is a professor emeritus of modern languages and literatures at Fairfield University; he holds a BA, MA, and PhD. In addition to his first novel, The Translators, he has published eighteen books of translations of Spanish and Portuguese literature. He and his wife live in Fairfield, Connecticut.

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Copyright © 2013 ROBERT FEDORCHEK.

Copyright © 2013 Terry Taggart, cover photograph

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The Choice is a work of fiction. All characters, occurrences and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8353-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8355-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8354-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905695

iUniverse rev. date: 5/7/2013

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Mousetale 1: A House Mouse

Mousetale 2: Henry Journeys to Maine

Mousetale 3: Lovemouses

Mousetale 4: Four of a Kind

To Pilar, Mary, and Sally

Acknowledgments

A number of people very willingly came to my aid while I researched and wrote The Choice. I am grateful to: Katherine Malmquist, Manager of the Chagrin Falls [Ohio] Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library; Zo Sykora, Photograph Archivist of the Chagrin Falls Historical Society; Terry Taggart of Tagart Studio, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who provided me with a unique cover illustration photograph; Theresa Fedorchek, my wife, who critiqued, reviewed, and proofed numerous drafts; Louise Foster, my sister, who lent ongoing support; and Paul Foster, my brother-in-law and past president of the Chagrin Falls Historical Society, who took up my cause with Terry and gave generously of his time and counsel.

Chapter One

AS WAS HIS wont on a Sunday morning, Joe Ingersoll had just begun to fill his Cuisinart with freshly ground coffee when he paused to glance out the kitchen window. A late December snow hugged the ground, glistening like a serene coat of hoarfrost. Winter gladdened him, and always brought back happy boyhood memories of sledding and ice skating, building a family of snow creatures, and snowball fights with his brothers.

Joe delighted in the views from every floor of the small house he had purchased two years into sedate retirement at the age of sixty-four. Perched on the crest of a knoll, it overlooked a stream that coursed alongside the cemetery adjacent to the eastern and southern sides of his property.

The fact that a cemetery bordered his nearly rectangular two acres prompted much commentary, especially from Katy McNutt, a former colleague in the Public Relations department at General Electric’s corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. Alongside a cemetery? she had said to him. You are the strangest man, even for a lifelong bachelor.

Joe never bothered to explain to her or anyone else that he found the location ideal: there would, obviously, be no further construction on the cemetery sides; the northern side ended in a cul de sac with only one neighbor; and on the western side—his right of way and entry—there stood a mere handful of houses shielded by dense tree growth that an enlightened builder had disturbed as little as possible. Unlike many a dwelling in Easton, Connecticut, the section that bordered Westport, his didn’t trumpet luxury and ostentation, but modesty and privacy. Modesty because he had only three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, whereas most all the other houses on Purple Beech Drive had at least four bedrooms and six bathrooms, and two, that he knew of, had five of the former and eight of the latter; and privacy because he sat atop a hillock surrounded by the trees for which the Drive was named. The other feature that had attracted Joe was the interior elevator: it took him to a third floor that accommodated a library and music room that would have made his neighbors green with envy upon discovering the spectacular four-seasons view.

Standing at the kitchen sink and gazing out the window, Joe shuddered with an early morning chill, shivers that traveled down his spine and snaked through his arms and legs. As he contemplated the wintry Currier-and-Ives landscape, all of a sudden he remembered the observation made by his late mother when she had been in her eighties: When you’re older you’re colder. Yes, he thought, the rhyme was catchy, but what had always stayed with him was how she had managed to sum up the aging process so succinctly.

Would he go for his daily forty-minute walk on a fixed route that took him, one-point-six miles, to the southeastern exit of the cemetery and back? The thermometer affixed to the deck post read 19°, a mite too cold, thought Joe. Better I wait until early afternoon when surely it’ll reach the mid or high twenties.

Joe sighed. He was postponing the inevitable, and the decision had to be made. Of course he had already made the major one—not to send an e-card, one of those ubiquitous e-mail blasts, with Disneylike creatures frolicking amidst pine trees, a scene wherein the chimney of a brightly lit cabin issued smoke that wafted upward to a star-spangled firmament that twinkled and glittered, but was devoid of a personal touch. The minor decision was where to address what he called real Christmas cards. In his living room where he had set up three illuminated Victorian-era villages and could light an honest-to-goodness fire in the fieldstone hearth with seasoned apple and hickory logs? Or in the third-floor library where he had a natural gas-driven fireplace that flamed merrily over faux logs? It didn’t take him long to decide: he opted for the latter, where he would not have to tend the fire while writing, and where he would listen to Chanticleer and, in between cards, survey the landscape and perhaps catch a glimpse of a deer or a fox in the woods, or even swans bobbing on the frigid water of the reservoir.

First, though, the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times that had long been Joe’s weekly guide to theater, concert, and museum doings in New York City. In one of the rare happy coincidences of his life Joe had received, upon bidding farewell to GE, a much coveted parking space at the Fairfield train station after thirteen years on the wait list. As a result, he frequently ventured into the city armed with a Metro North pass, always taking a book to read during the seventy-minute ride to Grand Central Station; and, unfazed at getting lost on the subway and bus routes, he had learned his way around the spike of land between the East and Hudson Rivers. Only once, on a day of pelting, wind-blown rain, had he mustered the courage to drive his Buick into Manhattan in order to spend a morning at the Strand, at Broadway and Twelfth Street, which he judged the best bookstore on the eastern seaboard. But wouldn’t you know that upon exiting the Joe DiMaggio Highway at West Thirty-fourth Street to park near the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center he was broadsided—empty passenger side, Thank heavens, he had reported to Sally—by a recently arrived Russian cabbie who barely spoke English and claimed that Joe had run a red light… until his two irate fares informed several members of New York’s finest that the cabbie had run the light, not Joe. After that, it was the train, the train, rain or shine.

Joe was about to read the feature article on Laura Linney when the phone rang. A quick glance at caller ID told him it was Sally Stobbs, his lone cul-de-sac neighbor. She had been going through a very tough time. Divorce had thrown her into the daunting world to which he had become accustomed a long time ago: the world of aloneness. Not that she now led a solitary existence, for her seventeen-year-old daughter, Julie, lived at home and attended Joel Barlow High School in Redding, which helped mightily to offset the absence of her nineteen-year-old son, Clay, a troubled freshman at Lehigh University who was adding to her challenges.

Good morning, Sally.

"Morning, Joe. Have I caught you in the middle of your New York Times?"

Joe couldn’t help chuckling. I guess I’ve mentioned my Sunday morning routine once too often. In any event, no, you haven’t. In fact, I’m chastising myself—mildly, mind you—because I must stop procrastinating and sit down to write Christmas greetings, although I shall do so with a much abbreviated list this year.

"It does my heart good to know I’m not the only one who hasn’t succumbed to the plethora of e-cards. Look, I won’t take up a lot of your time. Julie has told me not to be nervous about hosting a party, and that I’ll do fine on my own, well… not on my own, since she and you will be here to shore me up, but I need additional reassurance before the appointed ‘o’clock,’ as Dickens writes in A Christmas Carol. Please tell me once again that it’s the right thing to do and that I can indeed do it with grace if not aplomb."

"Throwing a party without Whit is the right thing to do and you can indeed do it with both grace and aplomb. It’ll get you going, so to speak, especially since I have no doubts that desirable representatives of the male of the species will soon be knocking at your door."

Let’s not start that again, said Sally, laughing.

Who’s starting? I’m merely stating, said he, mirth in his voice. Listen, Sal. A final check. I know that you and Jules will have prepared a ton of hors d’oeuvres and finger food, but have you laid in a sufficient supply of various kinds of booze and wine?

Enough for all comers to put on a glow and then some.

Good. It’ll loosen them up and you too.

That, Joe, is what I’m afraid of.

"Don’t be. Besides, you don’t need spirits to make you feel certain of who you are, simply a boost of self-confidence, which will come from the faith that you have in yourself. For far too long you thought of Sally Stobbs as Whitney Stobbs’s appendage, so to speak, and he let you think of yourself that way. It’s there, the faith, inside you, but you have to dust it off and let it see the light of day. Now. No more phone therapy. I’ll see you at five, sweetheart."

At five. And thank you, again, dearheart.

You’re welcome. I’ll come with—

Wait, wait. I’ve been so self-centered of late that I’ve been forgetting to ask. How are you doing? I know you were rather close to your sister-in-law and that you’ve been wishing you could do something to help your niece with her pain too.

Joe took a moment to phrase a response. How am I doing since Ivy died? Good God, I wish I could tell you the quandary her death has put me in. And if I did, would it change your view of me? It’s hard for both of us.

Then I’m even more glad, Julie too, that you won’t be all alone up there in your aerie and that you’ll be with us.

A week shy of Joe’s fifty-ninth birthday a radiologist had spotted a dark spot the size of a small acorn on his upper right lung. His primary, a second radiologist, and a surgeon had all advised him to undergo the necessary invasive procedure to determine the nature of the tumor, as a biopsy had been ruled out for fear of metastasis upon extraction should it prove to be malignant. In the event, it had been benign, but the aftermath of the operation had occasioned pain the likes of which had effectively reduced Joe to helplessness. And when Sally learned, within days of his return to his condo in the Stratfield section of Fairfield, that a caregiver would be visiting him but once a day and only to administer medications, and that Joe had had to arrange for meals through a catering service, she had become indignant. She had stepped in and taken charge, together with Julie (a twelve-year old in pigtails at the time), airily dismissing all his objections and protestations, and nursed him for the better part of a month. Joe had always seen her soft—and seemingly malleable—side, but during his recovery he had tapped into her strength, and had discovered that she had an inquisitive mind, kept —or suppressed?—under wraps, and had learned that she had a keen interest in landscape architecture, and he had grown to admire her and miss her when she was absent. And it had been shortly after his convalescence, at a luncheon in the city, that he had witnessed her husband’s perfidy and wished that he could have throttled him with a sock on the jaw.

Joe had, initially, liked Whit, but as Whitney Stobbs climbed one of New York’s corporate ladders he became hardened in his pursuit, sliding into a fixation on material gain at the expense of the spiritual nourishment and sustenance of family life. As a result he began to find less interesting, less alluring the lovely woman who was busy raising their two children and handling the mundane affairs that allowed him to pursue his goals. That she became a grass widow as the result of believing that he loved her as much as he loved himself was only the beginning of her sorrows. She needed to dust off more than she knew. And Joe… well, Joe had had to struggle mightily to combat the emotional stirrings that he well knew could never be voiced, much less exhibited, when he allowed his mind free reign to picture Sally at his side. Wake up, JJ. You’re the shoulder for her to cry on. Not to mention that other minor detail. You know. The close to twenty years detail?

Joe poured himself a cup of coffee and again stared out the window. As he was still lost in a brown study, the two words reverberated like two lone pennies being tumbled in one of those old-fashioned ceramic piggy banks. Sweetheart. Dearheart. Sweetheart. Sweetheart . . . And thoughts of another sweetheart, a long-ago sweetheart, who was never far from his mind—and ever present at that time of the year, for as much as he tried to suppress them and her—came into a kind of crystalline focus. It was as if his mind’s eye had been converted into the slide show of a digital camera, for images burst forth with such clarity that he shook. An inveterate bookworm, Joe had recently finished rereading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and, keyed now as he was to long-ago events, Levin’s questions rose before him like specters (although unlike Konstantin Levin, he was nowhere near suicide): What am I? And where am I? And why am I here? And he wondered whether all sojourners on planet Earth must, at some point, ask these questions of themselves, irrespective of the paths they have chosen to follow in life.

Good God. What do I do about the letter Ivy sent me? Well… not so much the letter since I didn’t reply and can’t now, but about those four pages, and especially that handwritten note in the margin of one of them.

Joe, we must tell her. Now that your m other has died we must tell her. We, you and I both, have waited long enough, and guilt consumes me. You know I won’t do it without your okay, without your support, and preferably on-the-premises, at-my-side support. Tell me if what I’ve written is all right. You know how much it matters to me.

Like the damn fool that I am, I temporized and procrastinated. And she was so right. With Dad dead these many years and Mom gone now too, and she’s the one it would have shattered if it ever reached her ears, there was no justifying not telling her. Except fear of the consequences of a truth, the unvarnished truth, known only to the three of us.

Chapter Two

THE STACK OF 8½-by-11-inch neatly typed sheets numbered at upper right were wedged inside a three-ring binder with the holes still unpunched. She stared at them with a racing heart. Would it be like a message from her recently deceased mother? There was no note on the binder, no post-it to say what Ivy Ingersoll’s intentions had been. But if they weren’t intended for her daughter, then for whom? After all, the cardboard box in which Bobbie had found them was not hidden from view as if it were the source of some dark secret. Besides, she truly believed that if her mother had harbored any secrets they wouldn’t be of the dark, sinister sort, especially since she had chanced upon her at the computer keyboard several times in the past three months and had never once been shooed away like an intruder. Although come to think of it… each time her mother had ignored her questions and casually (in retrospect, perhaps deliberately?) changed the screen to prevent her daughter from catching a glimpse of what she had been writing. And all of a sudden the same bizarre thought that had reared its irrational head countless times in the two and a half weeks since Ivy Ingersoll had passed enveloped Bobbie like fog on a gloomy, drizzly night: she again got angry with her mother not only for dying, but for dying at the start of the season of the year that she loved above all others. Nevermore would that loving grandmother bundle up her grandson to go sledding and give him a push down a gentle hill where his father waited to catch him at the foot of it. And her eyes flooded with tears.

Bobbie Feller, née Roberta Ingersoll, had had to explain more times than she could recall throughout the five years of her married life that she, her husband, Ken, and their four-year-old son, Herbie, had all been born and bred in northeastern Ohio; that they were not related to #19, Bob, Rapid Robert, Feller, the Cleveland Indians’ great Hall of Fame pitcher who hailed from Van Meter, Iowa, but now resided in nearby Gates Mills, Ohio; and that, yes, they had met him as the result of a newspaper article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the shared surname. During the interview Ken had said, Sure, we’d love to meet him, but he’s famous and knows all kinds of other famous people and bigwigs, and we’re just ordinary folks, Bobbie and me, trying to make a good home for our little boy. And Bobbie herself had added, We wouldn’t dream of pestering him and invading his privacy. It’s kind of neat, though, since we’re fans of The Tribe, to be a little bit related to him. Would they ever have imagined what happened the very day that the article appeared? Crotchety and brash and opinionated on the one hand, and generous and loyal and warm on the other, Bob Feller himself, not a press agent, had phoned them to ask whether Herbie would like an autographed baseball. And he had gone to them! With a photographer friend so they would have pictures for their family album, and, in addition to the ball for Herbie, Bob (Please. Call me ‘Bob.’) had brought an Indians’ child’s cap and warm-up jacket with the Chief Wahoo logo, as well as a bat and glove for when he could play in the Little Leagues.

If only I could decide whether or not to read these typed sheets as easily as Bob Feller decided to call us, she thought. Then again, if Mom didn’t want me or anyone else to read them, why leave them out in the open? Why… write them at all? She had clammed up about them the way she had always clammed up about Daddy’s death, a death I don’t remember, obviously, since I wasn’t even born when it happened. It’s too painful, but… some day—I’ll tell you about it some day. She had said that to her daughter so many times that Bobbie had finally stopped asking.

She knelt on the floor, hands on her knees. Rich brown hair brushed to a sheen reached her shoulders, framing a pretty face of apple cheeks, full lips, and brown eyes infused with grief. Bobbie continued to stare, and, taking a deep, apprehensive breath, picked up the stack. The top sheet was blank. Would reading what followed be an invasion of her mother’s privacy? Would Ivy Ingersoll have wished to edit or revise or cut or even destroy some or all of what she had written? Was leaving this kind of written word how the dead had a say in the lives of the living, how they affected the lives of the living? Bobbie again recalled the wording her mother had used those many times: I’ll tell you about his death some day. The word tell. Did it mean speech? Did it mean relate or recount orally? But writing was telling too, wasn’t it? Her heart palpitated as she turned to the next sheet and saw the three words in caps, each with an X drawn before it:

X-DISCLOSURE? X-ADMISSION? X-CONFESSION?

Below the three Xed words, her mother had handwritten:

I don’t know which, honey. You’ll have to decide for yourself after you’ve finished reading, and then we can talk. All right?

Bobbie gasped. The words took her breath away! ". . . and then we can talk." She slumped against the wall and wept. As copious tears clouded her eyes and coursed down her cheeks, images of her mother struggled to come into focus, hazy images like ones seen through the rain-slicked windshield of an automobile, the wiper blades playing havoc with definition, causing textures and shapes to change rhythmically. She couldn’t see her mother’s auburn-turned-white hair, her placid face, her eyes the rich blue of the purest aquamarines, her small nose, her lower lip fuller than the upper, her slightly pointed chin, her cheeks that filled with joy (and, inexplicably, a hint of sadness) when she smiled at Herbie… and Bobbie squeezed her eyes shut, willing the tears to stop, wiping them with her wrists.

Ivy Ingersoll had been present, clad in mask and gown, in the delivery room when Bobbie gave birth to Herbie (the name was Ken’s idea, as he was a great fan of Herb Score, one-time Indians’ pitcher and Tribe radio broadcaster). Seeing that she had encouraged her daughter to breast-feed her baby, she had also witnessed with a glowing smile the first time that Herbie latched onto a peaked nipple and suckled greedily. Bobbie once observed to her sister-in-law, Joyce, Ken’s sister, that she knew—like countless other new mothers knew—that legions and legions and legions of loving grandmothers had helped their daughters to become good mothers, and she counted herself among the most fortunate. She had pinned a famous Bil Keane circular comic on a piece of pasteboard and with a magnet had secured it to the freezer door, the one in which the little pig-tailed sister sagely and seriously announces to her little wide-eyed brother that, Grandmothers are mommies with lots of experience. And in your case, sweetie, thought Bobbie as she imagined her infant son cradled in her mother’s arms, with lots and lots of love as well.

She had only been sixty-three-years-old, for God’s sake! How could she have died from respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia? Sixty-three! When Ken’s mom was seventy-three and still going strong, the picture, as many people often put it, of health.

Ivy was a social activist, and green, and as civic- and environment-minded as they come. On Sunday mornings she would don her yard-work clothes and head for the Twinsburg Township Square pulling a wagon with three large buckets in the bed—one for discarded cans, one for discarded plastic bottles, and one for miscellaneous refuse matter. For close to two years she had lobbied members of the town council to allocate weekend clean-up funds for what she termed the disgraceful appearance of our town center as a result of Friday and Saturday night revelry. No dice; she was repeatedly informed that there wasn’t money in the budget for such an outlay during those tough economic times.

Tired and on the warpath after doggedly gathering trash like a bag lady and hauling it to the dump; indignant at the airy dismissal of the petition for which she had garnered well over one hundred signatures; and good and fed up with the council’s stubborn refusal to maintain the neat appearance of Twinsburg over weekends, one Sunday Ivy, Ken, and Bobbie had combed not only the entire square, but the curbs of Church Street and Aurora, Darrow, and Ravenna Roads, the four sides of the square. Ivy’s three buckets and her daughter and son-in-law’s two nearly doubled her weekly collection, and on that Sunday they took all the detritus and, openly and noisily, unloaded it at the main entrance of the town hall. And, adding insult to injury, because it was her intention to provoke the council to act, she taped a photocopy of the petition to the door and signed it, in the manner of John Hancock.

As she expected, the town issued her a warning and sternly informed her that any repetition would result in a fine. Ivy, Ken, and Bobbie had spread the word, and after another clean-up the following week, family members, friends young and old, and petitioners—some thirty-five or forty supporters in all—gathered at the town hall entrance with her and each one ceremoniously partook of a well publicized act of civil disobedience by histrionically piling pieces of trash at the very same door as the week before. To give the act more punch a professional photographer friend of hers had cheerfully taken shot after shot and arranged to have three of them appear in the Twinsburg Bulletin.

There ensued a real hullabaloo that quieted, and dramatically, when, after some determined digging, a friend of Ivy’s learned that one of the town council members was using a town-supplied automobile—that ran on town-supplied gasoline—to attend football and basketball games in Oxford where his son was a sophomore at Miami University. A contingency fund then magically surfaced to pay for increased police surveillance of the square on weekend nights as well as for a maintenance crew to sweep it. (Rumor had it, much to Ivy’s satisfaction, that the funds originated from the discontinuance of the use of a certain town vehicle that had been filling up at the town pumps.)

Bobbie shook at the recollection of all that she had shared with her mother. But now, she thought, continuing to stare at the three words, you’ll never again take pride in being called the bag lady, and—the scene in her mother’s kitchen materialized out of nowhere—we’ll never again bake the season’s sugar cookies together, chatting almost all of the time and laughing much of the time, and I won’t be able to spring the surprise on you. After all the years that Ken and I have been trying and had nearly given up hope… She had planned to break the news when the trays were in the oven so that her words wouldn’t have to compete with molds and sprinkles; she had wanted to see her mom’s pure blue eyes sparkle and light up her face. Would Bobbie herself have been able to suppress a sunburst of a smile before saying to Ivy, Guess what?

Chapter Three

AFTER GLANCING AT herself in the vanity mirror to gauge the appearance of her rose gold earrings, Sally checked her list of invitees a last time. For Cocktails & Dinner, the invitations had read. Because she felt like doing something that she did very well, she and Julie had prepared the amuse-gueles au roquefort and other hors d’oeuvres themselves, but the consommé madrilène, coq au vin with parsley potatoes and buttered green peas, the Domaine Denis Pommier 2004 chablis, and crème plombières au chocolat would be brought in and served by Levalier Catering of Westport. It was, in the words of Georges Levalier, "if not haute cuisine, safe cuisine, particulièrement for a group of diverse tastes. And, it occurred to Sally, with Georges’s people in charge she needn’t worry about decanting and aerating and sniffing the wine. Plus, and it was a huge plus, seeing that the caterers would be using her kitchen, glassware, china, and cutlery, they would also be responsible for the clean-up, leaving everything, as her mother used to say, spick-and-span." She and Julie had already set the dining room table for fifteen, and her elegant place setting that could accommodate twenty was making an appearance for the first time in a blue moon.

She stood. Should I wear different earrings? Whit gave these to me. Sally reached up to remove one, then stopped, hand in mid air. If I stop wearing all the jewelry he’s given me I’ll go about pretty much like a plain Jane. She took a deep breath, and of late she had been taking many a deep breath, and they didn’t always calm her. Like the phone call to Joe to ask for the third or fourth time whether she could pull it off, she rehearsed other questions. How many are coming because they truly want to come? How many are coming out of politeness to me? How many are coming feeling disloyal to Whit? Will they enjoy the solo atmosphere or find it wanting? And why am I worrying? Haven’t I told both Diane and Joe that the first step I must take is to view myself now as Ms. Sally Stobbs and not as Mrs. Whitney Stobbs?

Sally reached behind to position the clasp of her pearl choker in the middle of her neck. The act of raising her arms elevated her breasts, breasts—at the age of forty-six—not nearly as firm as they used to be, but still full and a magnet for many a male eye. And she shuddered at the recollection of a scene that had occurred at the Zollos not more than three weeks ago. As if it were a novel one, Sally once again regarded the image in the mirror, looking for… what? The things that she valued in life wouldn’t appear there. Her love as a mother, as a daughter, as a sister, as a friend, as a… See. You’re already thinking of yourself as… no longer married. No longer married? You’re divorced, Sally. Divorced. And does that explain why love as a wife doesn’t figure here? And if it does, did you stop loving Whit because he stopped loving you? Surely your love as a wife was deeper than that, wasn’t it? Or did Whit trample it? Why did you turn a blind eye to all the signs? Was it because he hadn’t been unkind, and that in retrospect you now see that he had been trying to let you down easy? What did you do, what had you been doing, that was wrong? What had you… Wait. Stop-right-there. Right-there. Why are you still assuming that you had done something wrong? Why are you blaming yourself? You have your faults, of course you do. Don’t we all? Which means that if blame attaches to you, and you’re beginning to wonder just how much it does, which is a healthy sign, then it attaches to Whit too, and more so. Especially after you learned…

Sally gritted her teeth, clenched her fists, calling on self-discipline to rid herself of thoughts that she had vowed to drive away.

If the inner woman didn’t reflect, the outer did. As she had done for quite a few years, Sally wore her silky blond hair in a pageboy, and no Westport coiffeur had succeeded in convincing her to change styles, nor had Whit, who had said on more than one occasion that she could do with an update. In fact, the last time that he had needled her about it he had added, It’s not that we can’t afford a hairdresser, you know, and besides, a change would make you look more modern. And Sally knew that for her at-the-time husband modern was a code word for New York chic or with-it New York women. Whit also thought that she had grown somewhat hippy. What did he expect? She had borne two children and had carried to term a third, a boy, who had been stillborn. Damn it, girl! Why are you seeing yourself through his eyes? Joe, God bless him, has assured you of what you yourself had come to believe in better days—that you’re not hippy in figure but womanly. And not too tall to look good in high heels. Damn good. And you told yourself only moments ago that you weren’t going to continue beating a dead horse. The list of invitees. You wanted to review the seating arrangements one last time before Julie sets the place cards. Check the diagram you’re going to give her while she’s dressing.

Only in length did Sally Stobbs’s dining room table bear resemblance to a refectory table of the sort found in monasteries and convents, for it seemed unlikely that any of the religious houses would have one with a bird’s-eye maple veneer and turned maple legs exquisitely crafted on special order by Winooski Mills of Vermont. She would sit at what had always been her place, the kitchen end; the opposite end of the extended rectangle, which had always been Whit’s place, would be empty of a chair, and that, thought Sally with a sad sigh, seemed right in the scheme of things.

On her right she would have:

• Joe, her anchor for the evening;