Read Online The View From Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Elinor Lipman
Tags: General Fiction
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Lenore. You have to accept that your boy did some pretty unforgivable things.”
As Anthony and I eavesdrop, we can guess Lenore’s question because we hear Margot answering “ Why is it against the law? Do you mean did he go to prison for personally inseminating patients? Not officially. But he was convicted of fraud and lying to a grand jury and”—she makes this up since Mrs. P’s legal knowledge is pitiful— “they got him on statutory medical rape.” She winks at me when she says this and I give her a thumb’s up. With a large dose of the entertainer in her, she is braver when her roommates are present.
We think Lenore is establishing a paper trail or perhaps is just bored because she writes weekly to Margot. Her letters maintain that Charles’s activities were not shenanigans but science. He was only trying to help desperate women get pregnant! If Margot had gone to the trial as she was supposed to, she’d understand that he had acted out of mercy. And surely Margot knows the pain of childlessness.
That is the cruelest cut of all. Anthony and I literally wrestle the phone from Margot’s hand to keep her from calling Lenore and escalating the battle. We pour her a drink and we agree: mean. So mean. An old woman distilled to her essence: cruel and stupid and immune to fact and reason.
And the latest! Lenore wants her pearls back, the long-ago engagement present she now says were family heirlooms merely on loan! The nerve! We know this is a lie. Margot went with her then-future mother-in-law to lunch, which was followed by a surprise errand in the diamond district. First Margot tries reason: “Lenore, do you remember our lunch? In the café at B. Altman? And then we walked over to your family jeweler and we picked them out? Brand-new ones?”
Lenore disagrees. Those were family pearls being restrung by that jeweler, a Jewish man on West 47th Street. If he was still alive, he’d back her up. They were merely picking them up or perhaps they were choosing a clasp. Margot says the worst and most frustrating part is that if Lenore was hooked up to a lie detector, she’d pass—so wholeheartedly does she believe that the pearls were in her family for generations and therefore subject to recall.
Margot might have stalled or dissembled with “They’re in a vault and I never can get to the bank when it’s open.” Or “Charles took them back when we got divorced. Didn’t he tell you?” But she was so stunned and so furious that she yelled the truth. “Well, guess what, Lenore? I sold them.” And for good, vitriolic measure she added, “And I had to sell my engagement ring, too. Was that your property as well?”
It has become, as we say around here, World War Three.
We don’t have to be psychologists to see what’s ailing Lenore. Her son the doctor is now her son the felon. Displacement has made Margot—rather than the judge, jury, prosecution, or DNA results—the enemy. She is not interested in the fine points of the divorce settlement. All she knows is this: Her boy went to medical school, worked around the clock, and was so run down during his internship, residency, and fellowship that he caught every cold and needed emergency surgery on what was perilously close to a burst appendix.
Have I mentioned that Lenore divorced Charles’s father for adultery on a grand scale? What we know is Charles’s version, which was alleged by his mother on his sixteenth birthday during intermission at Man of La Mancha, that Mr. Pierrepont supposedly forced himself on every secretary he ever hired and had a genius for recruiting the young and the willing. Eventually, he fell in love with the least wifely of the set, a woman named Juliet, of all things. He eloped to Florida, had two little girls—now in their twenties, if we haven’t lost count—and kept in touch with Charles and his sister only in the form of birthday cards, child support, and attendance at college graduations.
Due to the budgetary
As Anthony and I eavesdrop, we can guess Lenore’s question because we hear Margot answering “ Why is it against the law? Do you mean did he go to prison for personally inseminating patients? Not officially. But he was convicted of fraud and lying to a grand jury and”—she makes this up since Mrs. P’s legal knowledge is pitiful— “they got him on statutory medical rape.” She winks at me when she says this and I give her a thumb’s up. With a large dose of the entertainer in her, she is braver when her roommates are present.
We think Lenore is establishing a paper trail or perhaps is just bored because she writes weekly to Margot. Her letters maintain that Charles’s activities were not shenanigans but science. He was only trying to help desperate women get pregnant! If Margot had gone to the trial as she was supposed to, she’d understand that he had acted out of mercy. And surely Margot knows the pain of childlessness.
That is the cruelest cut of all. Anthony and I literally wrestle the phone from Margot’s hand to keep her from calling Lenore and escalating the battle. We pour her a drink and we agree: mean. So mean. An old woman distilled to her essence: cruel and stupid and immune to fact and reason.
And the latest! Lenore wants her pearls back, the long-ago engagement present she now says were family heirlooms merely on loan! The nerve! We know this is a lie. Margot went with her then-future mother-in-law to lunch, which was followed by a surprise errand in the diamond district. First Margot tries reason: “Lenore, do you remember our lunch? In the café at B. Altman? And then we walked over to your family jeweler and we picked them out? Brand-new ones?”
Lenore disagrees. Those were family pearls being restrung by that jeweler, a Jewish man on West 47th Street. If he was still alive, he’d back her up. They were merely picking them up or perhaps they were choosing a clasp. Margot says the worst and most frustrating part is that if Lenore was hooked up to a lie detector, she’d pass—so wholeheartedly does she believe that the pearls were in her family for generations and therefore subject to recall.
Margot might have stalled or dissembled with “They’re in a vault and I never can get to the bank when it’s open.” Or “Charles took them back when we got divorced. Didn’t he tell you?” But she was so stunned and so furious that she yelled the truth. “Well, guess what, Lenore? I sold them.” And for good, vitriolic measure she added, “And I had to sell my engagement ring, too. Was that your property as well?”
It has become, as we say around here, World War Three.
We don’t have to be psychologists to see what’s ailing Lenore. Her son the doctor is now her son the felon. Displacement has made Margot—rather than the judge, jury, prosecution, or DNA results—the enemy. She is not interested in the fine points of the divorce settlement. All she knows is this: Her boy went to medical school, worked around the clock, and was so run down during his internship, residency, and fellowship that he caught every cold and needed emergency surgery on what was perilously close to a burst appendix.
Have I mentioned that Lenore divorced Charles’s father for adultery on a grand scale? What we know is Charles’s version, which was alleged by his mother on his sixteenth birthday during intermission at Man of La Mancha, that Mr. Pierrepont supposedly forced himself on every secretary he ever hired and had a genius for recruiting the young and the willing. Eventually, he fell in love with the least wifely of the set, a woman named Juliet, of all things. He eloped to Florida, had two little girls—now in their twenties, if we haven’t lost count—and kept in touch with Charles and his sister only in the form of birthday cards, child support, and attendance at college graduations.
Due to the budgetary
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