Greg called me at seven the next morning, and I answered on the first ring because I had been sitting in the dark kitchen since five. “Mrs. Hollander,” he said. His voice was very tired. “I wanted you to be the first to know. The police reopened the case of my mother last night. They asked me to give them the folder, and a detective came to my house at ten, and stayed till midnight. I think it is going to be all right.” I put my hand on the counter. I had spent the evening before in that same spot, reading the documents he had slid across my table.
I should explain. Greg is the first husband of Rachel, the wife of my son Peter. They divorced six years ago, and by every account the divorce was bitter. I had never met him. He had come to my house the afternoon before, an unshaven man in a work jacket, with a banker box under his arm, and he had said, “Mrs. Hollander, I know you do not trust me. But I could not let you fly to Italy without seeing this.” Then he had laid out the bank statements of his mother, Dorothy, who lives in a nursing home in Dayton.
There was a power of attorney, signed in a shaky hand by a woman who, as the note of the doctor attached to it said, had been diagnosed with dementia three months before she supposedly signed it. There was a will, naming Rachel as the beneficiary of everything. And there was a slip of paper with my own name on it, Margaret Hollander, and the figure of my life savings, and a date next to it. Seeing my name in her handwriting had made my skin crawl. Paul had left me a comfortable sum. Rachel had known precisely how much.
“She did it to my mother first,” Greg said now, on the phone. “I was married to her for three years. I did not see what she was doing until I got the bank statements. By then my mother had signed the house over. She did not understand what she was signing. I went to the police, but there was no proof. The lawyer who notarized the power of attorney had retired. The case went cold. When I heard Rachel was marrying your son, and taking you to Italy, I thought, here we go again. I could not sleep.”
The truth tends to arrive late, in a worn jacket, with a box of papers, and asks only to be believed.
I had not believed him at first. I confess it. A mother does not want to think badly of the wife of her only son. I had bought the plane tickets, I had packed a hat for the sun, I had planned to sit on the terrace of the villa and watch the boats on Lake Como. But Greg had said something that stayed with me. He said, I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to check. And so I had stayed up all night, with the papers in front of me, and a phone call to my own lawyer at six that morning.
My lawyer, Mr. Abernathy, had been a friend of Paul for thirty years. He listened for ten minutes without interrupting. Then he said, “Margaret, do not sign anything. Do not give anyone access to your accounts. And do not say a word to Rachel.” He had already looked up the deed of Dorothy, and it said exactly what Greg had claimed. He made two calls to people he trusted in the office of the district attorney. By noon, a detective was on the phone to Greg, and the machinery of the law began to turn.
I went to see my son that evening. Peter was in the garden, pruning the roses, a tall man like his father, with the same stoop to his shoulders. I told him everything. I did not accuse. I only laid the papers on the patio table and let him read. He read for a long time. His hands began to shake. When he put down the last page, he looked at me and said, in a very small voice, “Mom, I think I knew. I think part of me always knew, and I could not look at it.”
Rachel was arrested at the airport lounge two days later, with two passports and a suitcase. She was charged with fraud against Dorothy and an attempted scheme against me. It was a terrible week. Peter lay on the couch of my guest room like a stunned animal, and I made him soup, as I had when he was a boy with the flu. We did not talk much. I only sat beside him and held his hand. On the fifth day, he sat up and said, “Mom, I am so ashamed.”
I told him there was nothing to be ashamed of in having a loving heart. The shame belonged to the woman who used it. I told him his father would have been proud of the way he faced it. Peter wept in my arms, and I thought of Paul, and of how he used to say that every man has to lose something before he finds what he is made of. When Peter dried his eyes, he asked if the trip to Italy was still possible. I smiled. I said it was.
We went in June, the two of us, and Greg came too, at my invitation, with his mother in a wheelchair, since the court had restored her home and her savings. Dorothy sat on the terrace of the villa in a straw hat, looking at the lake with a faraway smile. One evening, as the sun was going down, she turned to me and said, very clearly, “Thank you for believing my son.” I took her hand. I told her he was the one who had believed in me.