Love, Work, Children: A Novel - Hardcover

Cheryl Mendelson received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She has practiced law in New York City and taught philosophy at Purdue and Columbia universities. She is the author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House and the novel Morningside Heights. She lives in New York City.

CHAPTER 1

Four Forty-four Riverside Drive, a fine old residential building in Morningside Heights, was filled with aging couples whose grown children remained unmarried. The phenomenon was so general that it had begun to be openly talked of. Not so long ago, the Frankls and the Holmeses, whose daughters had been best friends all their lives, had been congratulating themselves on how successfully they had taught their children not to rush into marriage and how this augured well for their ultimate happiness. But now that the children were all around thirty, their restraint began to look like indifference and their unmarried state like a permanent one.

Until now, their sixtyish parents had led placid lives. Peter Frankl was a lawyer who, with his wife, Lesley, lived in one of the building’s two penthouses, with forty feet of windows framing sunsets over the Hudson. The Holmeses, Herbert and Ingrid, were both psychotherapists. They had a pleasant corner apartment on the fourth floor, from which, in winter when the trees were bare, they could see a few gleaming inches of the river. Neither the Frankls nor the Holmeses had money worries or health problems; all of them had significant careers except Lesley, who, however, painted contentedly in a home studio and now and then sold a canvas.

Peter Frankl’s marriage wasn’t all he would have liked. But he had put the children first, ensuring that they grew up in the calm of civil and secure family life, and deemed his marital problems tolerable. The Holmeses, by contrast, had one of those extraordinarily close, warm marriages that succeed through an unlikely amalgam of egoism and altruism, which, although rare and peculiar, is inevitably regarded as ordinary—perhaps because such unions are as boring and offputting to others as they are satisfying to the married pair itself.

The tenderly reared offspring of these couples had grown up to be everything their fathers and mothers could wish for. The children’s happiness and safety was the sweetest part of their parents’ lives and the rock on which the rest was built. This was true of all of them, but of Peter Frankl especially.

Peter, who had been orphaned when he was twenty, was terrified of loneliness. Loneliness, he knew, was fierce, with claws and fangs, not at all the tame, mild, forlorn thing people pretended it was. His wish for the children to find love was urgent and fearful, therefore, but he saw ominous evidence that, for them, love was not going to come easy.

True, his son, Louis, now in his early thirties, always had girls running after him, but he never seemed to get serious about any of them—not that Peter had ever really liked any that he had seen. Peter shifted from theory to theory about this: maybe there weren’t many nice girls out there nowadays, or maybe nice girls didn’t like Louis. Sometimes he even wondered how much Louis liked girls. His daughter Susan’s problem was even worse. Boys had always ignored her; a real boyfriend had appeared only once or twice in her life, the last time in college. Nonetheless, Peter had felt serious concern about her only when she passed her twenty-sixth birthday with no attachment, and his anxiety increased on each subsequent birthday until, on her twenty-ninth, when Susan had not had a real date for years, it sharpened into something more painful. Peter then became unequivocally unhappy about Susan. Right around then, Louis, too, had been wounded by someone he had been seeing briefly, a serious girl who was studying history. She went out with Louis three or four times, then told him that he was just not her type. Peter was delighted that Louis had pursued someone like her and was not surprised that she did not pursue Louis. Whatever the reasons, both his children now seemed to him lonely and troubled, settling permanently into a scattered, dry existence devoid of the intimate comforts of family life. Peter could no longer say to himself, as he always had before, that he didn’t really mind his own disappointments—not as long as the children were happy. There were now times when, adding their disappointments to his own, he felt that life had mistreated him.

Both Susan and Louis were good-looking, and Louis was tall, incomprehensibly so, given the merely average height of his parents; but in temperament and tastes the two were startlingly different. Louis, in his father’s opinion, was his sister’s inferior in the personal qualities that favored love—empathy, warmth, loyalty, altruism—despite the fact that he had so many girlfriends and Susan had no boyfriends. Susan had all those virtues, but only a few intimates ever saw much of them. With strangers, she often had a grave manner that made her come across as somewhat older than she was, and her conversation got stilted and bookish. Sometimes even her adoring father felt that something was a little off in Susan. As she got older, he more and more often wondered whether she hadn’t turned into a bit of a nebbish.

Susan was working for her PhD in musicology at Columbia, and her conversation was obscure with Renaissance musical arcana. Peter admired and encouraged her plans for a scholarly career and thought her brilliant, sure of professional, if not personal, success. She spent hours practicing her piano, pursuing her studies, and playing endless games of solitaire in the little apartment Peter had bought her on 114th Street a couple of years ago, when, at twenty-six, she insisted that she was too old to live at home.

Louis had had his own place on the East Side until he gave it up to return to school, but he had no scholarly tastes. He never read a book and never spent a minute indoors if he could avoid it. He had dates and played sports and went to parties with friends who were as unthinking as he and generally even richer. He was finishing an MBA at Harvard, where he had made a respectable record with surprisingly little effort, considering that the program was famously geared to grinds; he would undoubtedly line up a high-paying job in finance when he graduated—a plan his mother approved and his father did not. Louis had brains, Peter thought, if he’d only use them. Why would a boy with all his options, all his privileges and connections, go into finance? Peter, who admired scholars, artists, and philosophers, and regretted having settled for the law, which was at least better than finance, found it baffling.

The senior members of the Frankl family never socialized with those of the Holmes family, but the two sets of parents had plenty of opportunities on the elevator and at the mailboxes to comment on their girls’ situations, and each knew the other’s daughter well. The Holmeses’ Mallory had played beside Susan Frankl in the sandbox at the playground on the Riverside Promenade and attended nursery school with her, and afterward they had gone to the same exclusive school, where both were outstanding students, although Mallory, unlike Susan, was neither bookish nor musical, and was what has always been called “popular.” From the time she turned thirteen, Mallory had never been without a boyfriend for more than seven nanoseconds, as she put it—at least not until now. There were always a host of girls and boys with whom she went places and did things casually, whereas Susan’s connections with people were either intimate or distant, nothing in between. For the most part, Mallory was truly close only with Susan or, occasionally, with some friend of Susan’s, and with her own parents, whose love was so rich and wise that she felt little need for anyone else’s. Possibly there had been too many boyfriends, but none of the breakups seemed to have much effect on Mallory’s high spirits and friendly cheerfulness. The Holmeses had only recently begun to worry that something was wrong in this pattern, when Mallory broke up with the young man with whom she had been living for two years. To her parents, this felt awfully like a divorce, and they were upset. But Mallory did not appear to feel it as much as her parents. She was quiet, perhaps a bit low-key, perhaps worked a little too much, and that was about the extent of it. Mallory had picked up an MA in journalism at Columbia a couple of years ago and had recently got a job in the Features section of the New York Gazette. With her salary and a little help from her parents, she was just able to afford the small apartment near Columbia where she had lived while finishing her degree.

Susan and Mallory, now settled blocks apart in the neighborhood where they had grown up, had recently begun to discuss a shared sense that the shape of the future was vague. Mallory, for once, had no one new waiting in the wings and had begun to falter in her confidence about finding the sort of man who would suit her, and Susan had begun saying right out that she thought she would stay single. She questioned the institution of marriage and doubted, in any event, that she was suited for it. Also, she saw that remaining single was commonly the fate of women like herself, despite their privileges and advantages, even among those who believed in and sought marriage, and she had a hard time imagining the man who might fall in love with her. After all, no one had felt that way about her yet. Why should it happen now, when she was almost thirty?

“Of course I wish I had someone,” Susan said to her father shyly, “not necessarily a husband—just someone to be with, but it’s not in the cards, as far as I can tell. I don’t seem to send the right message or something.” Peter Frankl grieved when she said this, and afterward he brooded more intensely than e...