Elements of Style
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE: Frankie
CHAPTER TWO: Judy
CHAPTER THREE: Albert
CHAPTER FOUR: Abraham
CHAPTER FIVE: Clarice
CHAPTER SIX: Frankie
CHAPTER SEVEN: Judy
CHAPTER EIGHT: Charlie
CHAPTER NINE: Frankie
CHAPTER TEN: Barry
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Judy
CHAPTER TWELVE: Charlie
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Frankie
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Samantha
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Barry
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Samantha
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Frankie
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Clarice
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Charlie
CHAPTER TWENTY: Samantha
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Clarice
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Samantha
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Charlie
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Frankie
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Clarice
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Barry
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Judy
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Samantha
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Frankie
CHAPTER THIRTY: Barry
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Samantha
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Frankie
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Judy
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Barry
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Samantha
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Charlie
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Samantha
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Frankie
Permissions Acknowledgments
Also by Wendy Wasserstein
Copyright Page
For Gerald Gutierrez
—more than a director
Acknowledgments
I first mentioned the idea for this novel to my agent, Lynn Nesbit, over drinks after I delivered a lecture about Sloth at the New York Public Library. I remain grateful to her for preventing me from adhering to my own wisdom. Her insights have been incisive, and her knowledge of New York social mores is encyclopedic.
Throughout this process, my editor, Victoria Wilson, has been a source of wisdom, unsentimental guidance, and real friendship. Her support has been constant and invaluable.
Finally, even the daunting task of a playwright finishing a novel is worth it when at the end of the road there are drinks and a Bruce Willis movie with Sonny Mehta.
Jeremy Strong is a young talented actor. Michael Barakiva is a young talented director. They are both voracious readers of novels, and I am grateful to them for being able to read my handwriting and type this one.
My father, Morris Wasserstein, arrived at Ellis Island at age seven in 1928. He lived the next seventy-five years of his life in New York City. I am grateful for his belief in the promise of New York and its people.
I am eternally grateful to my five-year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, for her love, foresight, and courage in taking me, as a mother, to the offices of the best pediatricians in New York.
·CHAPTER ONE·
Frankie
Frankie Weissman pushed open the door to her new offices with two double-sized Penny Whistle Toys shopping bags. After spending the morning on her hospital rounds, she had gone into the store just to look. Soon she fell under the spell of a motorized “furr real” pink poodle and Smart Cindy, a foot-tall scholarly doll equipped with 16,000 megabytes of intelligence. Frankie was certain that within an hour she would be hearing her patients’ parents warning them, “Be careful. You don’t know where Smart Cindy’s been,” or “Don’t play with the poodle. You could get anthrax.” But at least Frankie knew she was making a fresh start.
“Dr. Weissman, Dr. Steele is on line one for you.” Rosita the receptionist looked up from the desk as Frankie walked into the waiting room.
Frankie’s jaw tightened. The part of her that was both a Princeton College and Harvard Medical School graduate secretly believed that people who insisted on calling themselves “doctor” generally had credentials like “director, International Hair Club for Men.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back.” Frankie lowered her head. She had learned over the years never to make eye contact when walking into a waiting room.
As she furtively glanced around for obvious catastrophes, she was simultaneously pleased and a little anxious that the office was packed. After almost fifteen years of experience, Frankie viewed general pediatrics as twenty percent emergency and the rest an oddly seasonal practice—early September school checkups, Presidents’ Day pneumonia, spring break sprains, and Fourth of July poison ivy. But this September the World Trade Center disaster had altered all familiar routine. Only now, in October, were the prominent city mothers putting their tumbling tots’ medical permission slips in order.
Frankie had known most of her patients since infancy. She was happy to spot six-year-old Brooke Santorini coloring on the floor in her three-hundred-dollar Bonpoint cashmere painter’s overalls and matching sweater. Her mother, Clarice, in autumn white size 4 jeans and matching twin set, was chatting avidly about the new Spence Lower School building with her decorator, Pippa Rose. Mrs. Rose was bobbing her head up and down in concerned agreement worthy of a Middle East peace treaty negotiator. Her own son, Alex, who was notorious at age six for being rejected by every ongoing school in Manhattan, Riverdale, and Brooklyn, was coughing directly into the watercooler. Slumped against a wall was Jessica Rodman, only ten but already filling out a Dolce & Gabbana red leather halter. Jessica was wailing something to herself about being “jilted one more time.” Frankie wasn’t sure if it was a pop song or Jessica’s real-life experience.
On the periphery of the room sat the caregivers, the current evolved term for nanny. Only a few of the caregivers were from the traditional nanny breeding grounds of Great Britain and Ireland. The rest were a diverse group of East Indian, Dominican, and Filipino. Frankie had deduced that the newer the money the older the nanny source. Thus Mrs. Adrienne Strong-Rodman, Jessica’s mother, had a nanny who claimed to have weaned Prince William and Prince Harry, heirs to the throne of England.
“Dr. Weissman! Dr. Weissman!” A large African-American woman exploded into the room with a small child and a baby. “Dr. Weissman, I see you over there! This is an emergency!”
Frankie turned around as the woman charged toward her.
“I need to leave my kids here with you. I’ve got to get my mother to the hospital in Brooklyn and I have nobody else to stay with them.”
“Mrs. Caesar, what happened to the day care center I arranged for you?” Frankie asked. All the other mothers and caregivers stopped their conversations to listen.
“They don’t want to go there. They’re still scared from the Trade Center.”
“I told you she won’t take us.” The older child, who was around eight, held her baby brother Clayton in her arms.
Frankie opened her shopping bags and pulled out the pink poodle. “Venette, I have some great new toys.” She pulled out the poodle and the dog began to bark to the tune of “La Marseillaise.” The girl gave Frankie the baby and took the poodle’s leash.
“Thank you, Dr. Weissman.” Mrs. Caesar raced out the door.
As Frankie passed the baby to a nurse she was blocked by Mrs. Adrienne Strong-Rodman, whose fringed Balenciaga leather jacket was now vibrating. Frankie’s receptionist had once made the mistake of simply calling her Mrs. Rodman and was immediately rebuked. “Please make a point of using all three of my names and both of my degrees, if possible, when referring to me.” Adrienne Strong-Rodman, J.D., Ph.D., claimed to be both a lawyer and a child psychologist. Somehow after a brief stint as a Hollywood publicist she reemerged as a high-powered entertainment lawyer with an expertise in children’s advocacy rights. Her career profile changed again once she landed the multibillionaire Paul Rodman.
No longer able to contain her fury, Adrienne Strong-Rodman turned to Frankie. “Listen. No one did more to raise money for social welfare in this town last year than I did. Just ask Lunch for Children, Women for Women, or Bottomless Closet. I work my ass off for diversity! But we’ve been waiting here for over twenty minutes and that’s unacceptable.”
Frankie looked down at Mrs. Rodman’s $1,950 rust crocodile Manolo Blahnik mules. She wondered if she had been equally irritated waiting for them. Then Frankie corrected herself. Adrienne Strong-Rodman would have the Manolos delivered to her home for perusal. That way she could get upstairs to her yoga hut, which she had just installed on the roof of her twin town houses, without wasting valuable time. In between working her ass off, Adrienne was in deep pursuit of inner stillness and calm.
“Just sign this.” Adrienne pulled a piece of paper and a pen from her white ostrich Hermès Birkin bag and put it in front of Frankie. “Jessica needs a note for skydiving class.”
“But Jessica’s only ten.” Frankie signed her name.
“Her father wants her to be fearless. And these days you need to be prepared. Have a nice day.”
She grabbed Jessica, the royal nanny, turned on her crocodile slide, and walked out.
Pippa Rose was already on her cell phone with the fast-breaking story. “Adrienne Strong-Rodman just lost it in Dr. Francesca Weissman’s office. I guess all that yoga isn’t working. Personally, I don’t think she was entirely out of line. I love Frankie Weissman, but she should never have moved her practice.”
Frankie knew the move had been a gamble. She had made her reputation at Park Avenue Pediatrics, a well-heeled practice with a chic neighborhood clientele. But when she turned forty, Frankie began teaching preventive medicine at a series of day care centers and elementary schools in East Harlem. Moving her own practice to 102nd Street and Fifth Avenue was her attempt to accommodate both ends of her Upper East Side patient spectrum.
But the truth was Frankie had a long history of ambivalence toward the entire privileged New York landscape. She had moved to the Upper East Side from Queens when she was twelve. Frankie’s father, Abraham, was a manufacturer of women’s hosiery who sent her to the Spence School simply because it was up the block. Abraham had few social pretensions, and he passed that trait on to his daughter. Frankie could not have found an office address more reflective of her personality than 102nd Street and Fifth Avenue. She knew that if she had a world, the Fifth Avenue one was it, but she was most comfortable on its fringes.
“Mrs. Santorini, I’ll be with you and Brooke in a minute.” Frankie smiled at them and walked back into her office.
As soon as she sat down the phone rang. “Dr. Weissman, Mrs. Schultz is on the phone. She says it’s an emergency.”
She picked up the phone. “Hello, Frankie Weissman here.”
Mrs. Schultz’s voice was quavering. “Dr. Weissman, Taylor has swollen glands and she’s sweating. I think there’s a rash on her hand, and Zitomer pharmacy has run out of Cipro!”
“She doesn’t necessarily need Cipro,” Frankie said calmly. “It sounds like it could be all sorts of things.”
“Should I rush her to an emergency room?”
“I would bring her here first. Tell Rosita to make an appointment for today.”
Ever since the first anthrax case was reported in New York Frankie got at least two hundred calls a day for Cipro. Mothers like Mrs. Schultz were constantly on the brink of biological warfare.
“Brooke, this way please. You’re in room three.” Irina, the Russian nurse, escorted Brooke and her mother into the examining room. When Frankie walked in to join them Brooke had picked up the book Go Away, Big Green Monster! which was lying on the windowsill.
“We have this book at my school. Dr. Weissman, I can make all the green monsters go away and never come back again.”
“Good girl! I’m glad to hear that!” Frankie imagined a roomful of kindergarten girls defending themselves against big green monsters. She also wondered if any of their parents were still missing among the Trade Center rubble.
Frankie asked Brooke to breathe deeply and put her stethoscope on the child’s toe. “Is this your heart, Brooke?”
The girl giggled. “No!”
Frankie put her stethoscope on Brooke’s elbow. “Is this your heart?”
The child began shaking her head no and laughing. “You’re silly, Dr. Weissman!” Finally, Frankie put the stethoscope on her chest.
“Stop, Dr. Weissman! Stop! This is my heart!”
“Thank you, Brooke. Thank you. I would have never guessed.”
Brooke grinned triumphantly as Frankie continued the examination.
Frankie was only running an hour late when Brooke left and by seven o’-clock she had caught up with herself.
“Have you seen this, Dr. Weissman?” Rosita came into her office waving the latest issue of Manhattan magazine, the established doyenne of urban magazines.
“Is someone we know in it?” Frankie took a wry pleasure in the social escapades of her patients’ mothers.
“It’s not about a patient. It’s about you. This is their postponed back-to-school issue and they named you the best pediatrician in Manhattan. Here, look!” She pushed the magazine in front of Frankie’s face.
“God, that’s an awful picture!” Frankie recoiled.
“I don’t think you look so bad.” Rosita peeked her head over Frankie’s shoulder. “You look like someone people could count on.”
“As my stepmother Helen would say, ‘Looking like someone you can count on never found anyone a husband.’ And furthermore they didn’t say I was ‘the best.’ Just ‘the best on the Upper East Side.’” Frankie put the magazine down. “Do we have any tuna fish?”
“Aren’t you going home for dinner?” Rosita asked.
“No, I think I’ll catch up on some things here.” It was an answer Frankie used at least twice a week to savor the calm of being alone in her office.
The staff kitchen was a small closet to the left of exam room five. There was only enough space for a counter, a microwave, and an avocado plant that managed to grow without sunlight or water. Gulping a diet iced tea, Frankie reread her mention in Manhattan magazine. She was angry at herself for being a little too pleased about it. But she was even angrier at herself for still secretly coveting Mrs. Rodman’s Hermès Birkin bag.
Her stepmother referred to her patients who lugged the $8,000 Hermès tote as “Birkin babes.” One year for Christmas, Helen even gave her a thirty-dollar plastic Birkin imitation with a note that said, “God willing, one day your husband will give you the real one.”
There was something almost detoxifying for Frankie about leafing through Manhattan magazine that night. It was the first issue since September 11 in which the magazine returned to business as usual with “Quality Goods” shopping hints and “Buzz-Worthy” local celebrity gossip. But she was caught off guard when she turned the page and saw a picture of a woman posing as a 1930s movie star, in a retro Balmain gown, feeding a seal in the Central Park Zoo. When Frankie looked up to read the headline, “The Fashionable Mrs. Acton,” she immediately recognized Samantha Acton from her seventh-grade class at Spence. As children they hardly knew each other. Even at that age, Samantha was the girl everyone else wanted to be. Samantha was beautiful then and she was obviously beautiful now. Frankie opened another diet iced tea and began to read.
“Samantha Acton, in the style-blazing tradition of Mrs. Astor or Babe Paley, defines the social order. Friends say that her secret is ‘she manages to make perfection effortless.’ Unlike the current flock of sunflower-seed socialites, Samantha has a zany lust for life. In a time when things seem haphazard, Samantha, great-granddaughter of New York legends August Van Rensselaer and Virginia Carnegie, is a true thoroughbred. And on top of that, she knows everything there is to know about modern art, music, and dance. She also single-handedly spearheaded the restoration of the seal fountain in the zoo in Central Park. After 9/11, Samantha made certain that the daily public seal feeding was back on schedule for the children of the city.”