The Corrections

“I’ll be Jimmy Hoffa,” Sinéad said, “and you guys be the Mob.”

They worked to inter the girl in sand, smoothing the cool curves of her burial mound, thumping the hollows of the living body underneath. The mound was geologically active and was experiencing little quakes, webs of fissure spreading where Sinéad’s belly rose and fell.

“I’m just now putting it together,” Brian said, “that you were married-to Emile Berger.”

“Do you know him?”

“Not personally, but I knew Café Louche. Ate there often.”

“That was us.”

“Two awfully big egos in a little kitchen.”

“Yuh.”

“Do you miss him?”

“My divorce is the great unhappiness of my life.”

“That’s an answer,” Brian said, “but not to my question.”

Sinéad was destroying her sarcophagus slowly from within, toes wriggling into daylight, a knee erupting, pink fingers sprouting from moist sand. Erin flung herself into a slurry of sand and water, picked herself up, and flung herself back down.

I could get to like these girls, Denise thought.

At home that night she called her mother and listened, as she did every Sunday, to Enid’s litany of Alfred’s sins against a healthy attitude, against a healthful lifestyle, against doctors’ orders, against circadian orthodoxies, against established principles of daytime verticality, against commonsense rules regarding ladders and staircases, against all that was fun-loving and optimistic in Enid’s nature. After fifteen grueling minutes Enid concluded, “Now, and how are you?”

Since her divorce, Denise had resolved to tell her mother fewer lies, and so she made herself come clean about her enviable travel plans. She omitted only the fact that she would travel in France with someone else’s husband; this fact already radiated trouble.

“Oh, I wish I could go with you!” Enid said. “I so love Austria.”

Denise manfully offered: “Why don’t you take a month and come over?”

“Denise, there’s no way could I leave Dad by himself.”

“He can come, too.”

“You know what he says. He’s given up on land tours. He has too much trouble with his legs. So, you just go and have a wonderful time for me. Say hello to my favorite city! And be sure and visit Cindy Meisner. She and Klaus have a chalet in St. Moritz and a huge, elegant apartment in Vienna.”

To Enid, Austria meant “The Blue Danube” and “Edelweiss.” The music boxes in her living room, with their floral and Alpine marquetry, all came from Vienna. Enid was fond of saying that her mother’s mother had been “Viennese,” because this was a synonym, in her mind, for “Austrian,” by which she meant “of or relating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire”—an empire that at the time of her grandmother’s birth had encompassed lands from north of Prague to south of Sarajevo. Denise, who as a girl had had a massive crush on Barbra Streisand in Yentl and who as a teenager had steeped herself in I. B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem, once badgered from Enid an admission that the grandmother in question might in fact have been Jewish. Which, as she pointed out in triumph, would make both her and Enid Jewish by direct matrilineal descent. But Enid, quickly backpedaling, said that no, no, her grandmother had been Catholic.

Denise had a professional interest in certain flavors from her grandmother’s cooking—country ribs and fresh sauerkraut, gooseberries and whortleberries, dumplings, trouts, and sausages. The culinary problem was to make central European heartiness palatable to Size 4 Petites. The Titanium Card crowd didn’t want Wagnerian slabs of Sauerbraten, or softballs of Semmelknödel, or alps of Schlag. This crowd might, however, eat sauerkraut. If ever there was a food for chicks with toothpick legs: low-fat and high-flavor and versatile, ready to fall in bed with pork, with goose, with chicken, with chestnuts, ready to take a raw plunge with mackerel sashimi or smoked bluefish. . .

Severing her last ties with Mare Scuro, she flew to Frankfurt as a salaried employee of Brian Callahan with a no-limit American Express card. In Germany she drove a hundred miles an hour and was tailgated by cars flashing their high beams. In Vienna she looked for a Vienna that didn’t exist. She ate nothing that she couldn’t have done better herself; one night she had Wiener schnitzel and thought, yes, this is Wiener schnitzel, uh huh. Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. She went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Philharmonic; she reproached herself for being a bad tourist. She got so bored and lonely that she finally called Cindy von Kippel (née Meisner) and accepted an invitation to dinner at her seventeen-room apartment on the Ringstraße.

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy in the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack of Cindy’s perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.