Hearts Read online

  Praise for Hilma Wolitzer and

  HEARTS

  “A fictional success … so rich in well-realized characters [that] it raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height … very funny and very sad at the same time, gentle and humane in mood, fully believable in its parts and in its whole, Hearts is a novel of our time and, I feel quite certain, for some time to come.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Splendid … Wolitzer’s ear is flawless; her dialogue has perfect pitch.… This is a comedy about the heart-wrenching process of growth; it is written with great skill.… Few readers will fail to be moved.”

  —The New Republic

  “Hilma Wolitzer has the extraordinary ability to make the ordinary into something rare and meaningful. She is a novelist whose central concern is our domestic lives, and she may well be the best such novelist we have.”

  —JONATHAN YARDLEY, The Miami Herald

  “Apt details of contemporary American life [and] an encompassing joie de vivre … delightful reading.”

  —Library Journal

  “Funny, sad … an unforgettable story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A beautiful novel, inhabited by people one instantly believes in, and filled with honest, complex, resonant emotion … full of nice surprises that seem utterly natural, and it ends as perfectly as one could wish.”

  —Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “Hilma Wolitzer is just the best.… Nobody makes me laugh and cry and care the way she does. Nobody else makes me so glad to be alive.”

  —JUDY BLUME

  “A beautiful book.”

  —RICHARD YATES

  Hearts is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2006 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1980 by Hilma Wolitzer

  Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by

  Random House, Inc.

  Excerpt from The Doctor’s Daughter copyright © 2006 by Hilma Wolitzer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, in 1980.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Doctor’s Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80688-8

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  v3.1

  WITH GRATITUDE for the generous support of

  the National Endowment for the Arts

  and the Corporation of Yaddo

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Dedication

  Preview for The Doctor’s Daughter

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  A Reader’s Guide

  1 In the idealized vision of mapmakers, New Jersey is tinted a delicate pink that has nothing to do with the industrial darkness of its larger cities. Linda Reismann, nee Camisko, drove her husband’s green Maverick from the hospital parking lot in downtown Newark into the gloomy evening landscape. She was a new driver; Wright had taught her with touching patience on the six Sunday afternoons of their marriage, while she sat rigidly upright and held the wheel in an uncompromising grasp, as if it were an enemy who might make a sudden hostile move.

  Wright had just died of a massive coronary seizure on the fourth floor of that hospital, shortly after the doctor left the room. “Well, he’s stabilized now,” the doctor said, bouncing a little on his heels. The stethoscope hanging from his pocket danced like a rubber snake. “And I’m really happy with our findings so far. It looks good—all systems go!” He gave a thumbs-up sign and went whistling down the corridor. Wright, who had been nodding and even smiling during the doctor’s pronouncement, nodded again, at Linda, released his weak grip on her hand, and shut his eyes forever.

  She was only twenty-six and there had already been three important deaths, with Linda the only one watching: her father’s, her mother’s, and now Wright’s. Maybe it was a kind of divine test, with the miraculous reward of personal immunity. To never have to die or be old! And with a couple of bonuses thrown in: to be as famous in the world as one is to oneself, to be thrillingly in love, and loved back, always.

  Wright died in the quiet modest way he’d lived. He collapsed at the surgical-instruments plant where he was an assistant foreman, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Between fainting spells, he protested about the fuss, saying it was only gas, only some junk he must have eaten, maybe that chicken hash, until they pressed an oxygen mask over his face and he was still.

  It was Linda’s day off from the Fred Astaire Dance Studios in Bayonne, and she was at home trying to feel at home when the telephone rang. Wright’s supervisor cautiously played down the seriousness of his call. “Listen,” he said. “It could be anything, right? Or it could be nothing.” A range too wide for her to contemplate. “So don’t worry,” he added, but his voice was as grave as a newscaster’s about to deliver an important bulletin.

  The trip to the hospital was the first one she’d ever made alone in heavy traffic. She went very slowly, braking every few hundred yards whether she had to or not, and honking warnings at cars and trucks that approached in the adjacent lanes. The Maverick’s horn made a silly, high-pitched squeal, like the sound of a whoopee cushion. Other drivers honked back, their horns deep and aggressive, and they made profane gestures from behind their rolled-up windows. Was she supposed to return them as part of some unwritten code of the road? But she was afraid that if she removed one hand from the wheel, even for an instant, the car would careen out of control and charge like a guard dog over the divider.

  By the time she reached the hospital she was exhausted, and the parking lot was filled. It was right in the middle of visiting hours. Linda finally found one stingy space, recently vacated by a motorcyclist, a space that required parallel parking, her major shortcoming as a driver.

  But she did it, with the contemptuous encouragement of two male kitchen workers who came from a side door of the hospital wearing white hats and carrying knives and spatulas. One of them stood directly behind the car, with the daring of a toreador, waving his knife like a sword. One false move on her part and he would probably slash her tires.
>
  “Come on, lady,” he said. “Turn her to the right. To the right, I said! Come on, come on, you have plenty of room, now cut it, cut it! Jesus H. Christ. Now straighten her out …”

  She was in perfectly, although she had no memory of the series of motions that put her there. And God only knew how she’d ever get out; the car in front and the one in back were only inches away. But she was manic with success for the moment, and then with terror because she had been summoned to this place.

  Upstairs, she found Wright asleep, the only occupant, except for a nurse, of the six-bed unit. The nurse looked at her watch. “Ten minutes only,” she said sternly, as if she had recognized Linda at once as a waster of valuable time.

  Wright was hooked up to leave for the moon. She stood in the doorway and stared. What would she say to him when he woke? She kept thinking the word “husband” as if that would give her a clue. But its private meaning eluded her, and was as mysterious and alien as it had been on the day they’d married. Husband? He was someone she barely knew, a dancing partner, an older man with a leftover child from another marriage, and with a sad, submissive heart. She closed her eyes briefly and tried to remember precisely how he looked, and could not.

  His illness frightened and embarrassed her. But she hardly ever knew what to say to people, even in ordinary circumstances. This was one of the reasons she had married so impulsively, as if the state of wifehood could mystically bestow instant experience and social ease. Other wives she’d seen, in supermarkets and movie theaters, had it, a smug radiance that demanded the best cuts of meat, that brought butchers and husbands alike to their knees.

  Her lack of confidence was also one of the reasons Linda envied actors and actresses. No matter what anyone said about how hard their profession was, all the words were written out plainly for them to say, and how to say them, and where to stand. She’d read recently in a movie magazine that even the kissing, which appears so convincingly spontaneous on the screen, doesn’t just happen. The actors are told exactly where their lips have to meet, so the light will be perfect, and the camera angle. They have to do it over and over, and when their lips become dry and chapped from the effort and the frustration, a makeup artist comes by with a little plant atomizer and sprays them back to moist sensuality.

  She tiptoed in and put her purse and sweater on a chair near one of the other beds. Wright’s eyes had opened and they explored the room for her like those tower search beams in movies about prison breaks. He spoke in a disguised voice, hushed and sedated. “Linda?”

  If this were a movie instead of her real life, there would have been a director across the room, slouched in one of those canvas chairs they use, who would say, “Go to him now, Linda. Slowly. Sit by his side, with your head tilted this way a little. Ahhh, that’s good, that’s fine. Now take his hand and say, ‘I’m here, sweetheart. It’s all right.’ ” Or something like that. At least she would know what to do. But she was definitely on her own. The nurse, with another significant glance at her watch, had turned her back.

  When Wright said Linda’s name again, she dream-walked to imagined instructions. She sat carefully at the edge of the bed so as not to jar him or the fantastic machinery to which he was secured. Without thinking, she looked directly into his face, and it was a known face, despite its astonishing pallor. Comically rugged, like a fist, but kindly. She couldn’t deny knowledge of its sometimes greedy, sometimes apologetic mouth, of the reddish chin bristles that had sprouted since his early-morning shave, and of the brown eyes as gentle and undemanding as a domestic animal’s. And she heard him sigh and breathe deeply, the way he often did in troubled sleep. Husband. She looked across the room again and only her red sweater was there, neatly folded on the molded plastic visitor’s chair. Even the nurse had disappeared into a closet, where she could be heard rustling among supplies.

  Lights. Camera. Linda thought of taking Wright’s hand, but before she could he took hers, which looked unnaturally ruddy and durable, and tried to squeeze it. She squeezed back, willing the transfer of some of her own unfair portion of health. Before she could speak, the door swung open and, powered by the excitement of his own optimism, the doctor came into the room.

  2 Robin was listening to the radio and finishing the fine details on her social studies project—a diorama of the French Revolution. Dr. Fox and his stupid assignments. She had cut his class a lot this marking period and he’d threatened to fail her if she didn’t turn this thing in on time. What a total asshole. On the wall in the girl’s room at school, someone had written: Do you know Dr. Fox’s wife? Yeah, every night, someone else had scrawled.

  The scene in Robin’s diorama was fixed in a shoebox her father had given her. He always saved stuff like that: shoeboxes, shirt cardboards, frozen-juice cans, in case she’d ever need them for something. Robin had painted in the backdrop of spectators at the beheading of Marie Antoinette. She worried now that they looked too modern, too American, like fans in the bleachers at a Mets game. Any moment they might rise as one and yell, “Play ball!” The rest was wonderful, though. Her father had helped her the night before with the construction of a miniature working guillotine. In fact, he became so excited and so involved that he practically did the whole thing himself. After a demonstration, using a raw carrot that fell in precise golden circles, he insisted on inserting the sharp edge of the razor blade into the wood, for safety’s sake. Too bad. Robin would have loved to see sly old Fox try it out—ca-chunk!—his finger falling like a carrot slice into the provided basket. Now it only contained Marie’s tiny molded clay head. Robin had reluctantly used yellow Plasticine for that, after eliminating the other available colors. Green and blue were out of the question and the red was too blushingly healthy. Marie looked as if she had been strangled first; her clay eyes popped and her tongue protruded. The rest of her body, dressed in a tattered Kleenex, still knelt in a belated attitude of prayer. Linda the Wimp had said it was certainly a very unusual and creative project, but she’d turned pale when she looked at it and wouldn’t eat any of the carrot slices later.

  The Bee Gees were singing “How Deep Is Your Love,” and Robin kept peering quickly into the shoebox, and squinting, to see if a sudden glimpse gave the whole thing more historical reality, if the cotton balls pasted onto the sky-blue sky could easily pass for clouds.

  At least Linda wasn’t here now, breathing down her neck, offering dumb advice that nobody asked for. Last night she’d tried to get Robin to put a small purse mirror somewhere in the scene as a frozen lake, with the rest of the cotton fluffed around it for snow. She said that she’d always used a mirror when she made a diorama for school. If you put little cardboard skaters on it, Linda said, they’d be reflected in the mirror. Skaters! While the queen was telling them to go eat cake, and getting her head chopped off for it.

  Something was missing, though. Robin stepped back from the kitchen table to get a new perspective, and noticed the printing on the side of the box: Cordovan Stroller 11D 19.95. She’d have to cover that with masking tape later. The thing that was missing, she realized, was blood. There had to be plenty of blood. She thought of using ketchup, the way they did in the movies, but from some of the permanent stains on her clothing, she knew it would dry too dark. She could prick her own finger for the real thing. That idea made her feel a little queasy and would bring the same eventual results as the ketchup. This blood was supposed to be freshly spilled, freshly red. Nail polish! That was it. Linda wore it all the time, even on her toenails; twenty spots of lacquered blood.

  Robin went into their bedroom, trying to avoid notice of the bed itself. This was almost impossible to do, since it was king-sized and took up most of the modest room. It was better not to think of what probably went on in here. She looked away to the dresser top, where a few items of Linda’s makeup were scattered: mascara, lip gloss, blusher. No nail polish in sight.

  Robin opened the night-table drawer on Linda’s side of the bed, her interest quickening despite her disgust. Who knew what s
he’d find? Last year, when she and her friend Ginger were sitting for the Firestones, a young couple on the next street, they’d discovered a circular plastic case in the bedroom, with Mrs. Firestone’s diaphragm inside. Robin had only a vague idea of what it was, but it looked shockingly clinical and was the same color and texture as the rubber gloves she’d once seen in the doctor’s office. As she stared at the diaphragm, she thought of cows’ udders and unspeakable examinations, and was confused by the innocent sprinkling of talc across its surface. She and Ginger searched after that for more evidence of the Firestones’ secret nights, but they didn’t find anything else.

  Linda had lots of junk in her bedside drawer, but nothing that could ever be construed as sexual. There were check stubs, a single brown shoelace, a stick of gum, and supermarket coupons for room deodorant and dog food. They didn’t even have a dog. The drawer had a pungent domestic smell, like camphor or laundry bleach. Robin’s mother must have kept other, more exotic things here. Robin wasn’t sure what they were, but she knew they had to have been intimate and delicate, the small private treasures of a beautiful woman. She slammed the drawer shut and went into the bathroom. The nail polish was right there, next to the spare roll of tissue, on top of the toilet tank. The color was Frosted Fire, and it was perfect.

  Robin carried the bottle back to the kitchen, where, humming with concentration, she dipped the little brush over and over again, and applied the final scarifying details to the diorama. It was a veritable bloodbath when she was done. There were generous drops of red polish on the divided sections of the queen’s neck, more on her dress and on the guillotine’s dull blade. There was a thick, glazed puddle at the bottom of the basket and, after Robin’s hand faltered, a few splatters on the cotton clouds and across the faces of the cheering crowd in the backdrop.

  She was thrilled with the dramatic results, and as she moved back to admire them from a distance, a car door slammed outside. Wait till her father saw this! She ran to the window, but it was only Linda, walking slowly from the Maverick toward the front stairs.