Read Online The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine - Free Book Online Page A

that he "made a living," as her grandmother used to say. They had two small children, twin girls, who took violin lessons with tiny violins and played soccer in tiny uniforms. Evan had just left one job in public relations for another--Frederick had received that news during one of his dinners with Annie. "As long as he's not on my payroll," he'd said when he got off the phone, and Annie, who revered her children and would never have spoken sarcastically about them to anyone but herself, had been a little shocked at his disloyalty, then had quickly chastised herself as a humorless Jewish mother. Frederick had mentioned that Evan's girlfriend, with whom he had just broken up, was a model, something Evan himself immediately inserted into the conversation now, as if both she and the breakup were one of his professional credentials. He looked rather like a model himself, a tall handsome young man, and Annie thought she caught him making a model face in the window's nighttime reflection, pursing his lips, glaring, pulling in his chin just a fraction.
    "So you're the famous Annie," Gwen said with a distinct lack of warmth.
    "Dad talks so much about you," Evan said, and Annie got the impression that, like his sister, he would have preferred that "Dad" find a new topic of conversation.
    "Annie, I was hoping I could take you out to a celebratory dinner tonight," Frederick said.
    "Don't you think you should be getting back, Dad?" Evan said. "I don't like the idea of you driving so far at night."
    Frederick laughed. "You guys," he said.
    "It's a six-hour drive," his daughter said sharply. "Six and a half."
    "Isn't it lucky I don't have a curfew?"
    Even as he said it, Annie could see that although Frederick may not have had a curfew, it would be enforced. She and Frederick were not going out to dinner that night. Children were tyrants.
    Felicity had come to the reading to hear her brother, and as Felicity approached the table, her turquoise eyes wide as always, Annie noticed how much Gwen resembled her. Perhaps those eyes remained wide as she slept. Or rolled open like a doll's.
    "You mustn't monopolize the star," she said to Annie.
    "No, of course not."
    "I mean, I am his sister ." And she gave Annie a meaningful look, the meaning of which Annie could not make out.
    Annie pointed to her own sister, as if that would somehow justify her standing by the table. "There's my sister," she said, and she waved Miranda over, signaling desperation by the childhood code of tapping her left eyebrow with her right pinky, a gesture distinctive enough for a trained sister to recognize but not quite awkward enough to arouse suspicion.
    "Your father has a beautiful reading voice, don't you think?" Miranda said when she was introduced to Gwen and Evan. "I think this book is extremely powerful. The prose is so vigorous . . ."
    The pro forma remarks, into which Miranda was politely inserting as much sincerity as she could muster, would have gone on, but Annie interrupted her with a blunt "My sister's an agent."
    "Oh yes," Gwen said. "We know." She gave Miranda a cold smile.
    "Infamy becomes me," Miranda said.
    "Everything becomes you, beautiful Miranda," Frederick offered, rather gallantly, Annie thought. "'In thy face I see the map of honour, truth, and loyalty,'" he added in the exaggerated way people do when they are quoting.
    "Lovely family, too," Felicity said, with her pie eyes looking almost challenging. "But then why shouldn't they be?"
    "Where are you off to that's so many hours away?" Annie asked Frederick. She did not even bother to add "after dinner." Somehow that was settled--there would be no dinner. No discussion, no dinner, just settled.
    "The Cape."
    "Why you want to live there I do not understand," said Gwen. "The summer, yes. But winter?"
    "Your father is sentimental," Felicity said. "Not that it has done him any harm. In the way of real estate appreciation."
    "Oh, I love Cape Cod in the winter," said Miranda. "To stand high up on one of