Free Florence Gordon by Brian Morton Page A

cost-effective in keeping the violent mentally ill from clogging up the courts.) When you’re in CI, most of the other cops don’t think of you as a cop anymore; they think of you as a social worker with a badge. And for Daniel, at least, the description was accurate.
    His parents didn’t know anything about all this. As far as they understood, he was a cop now, through and through. They didn’t know that he still read, doggedly and intently—they probably assumed he’d stopped reading. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure why, he got the feeling that they didn’t even think of him as Jewish anymore. They apparently held to the Lenny Bruce theory that if you live in New York you’re Jewish, and you’re a goy if you live anywhere else.
    But though he was more like his old self than his parents realized, he wasn’t simply the same old Daniel in disguise. He’d been changed by his experiences, and he’d wanted to be changed by them. He had a different idea of what was important. He didn’t believe you could be judged by the number of books you’d read or the number of articles you’d written; he didn’t believe your worth was based on your attainments or your erudition or even your intelligence. Just about the only thing he valued was simple decency.
    Janine had been with him through all of this. She had watched him grow into manhood. Year by year she had been more and more impressed—with his steadiness, his compassion, his gentleness with and interest in the children. But she couldn’t tell herself that all of his changes had pleased her. When they were young, he’d seemed ambitious—or maybe she’d just assumed that he was—but it had been years since he’d shown any signs of wanting to improve himself in any way. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe she should have felt nothing but appreciation for his ability to treasure the life he actually had. But she’d always believed that if you weren’t striving, you weren’t alive, and she couldn’t understand his complacency.
    The life they lived was far from the life she’d always dreamed of living—a life of cultural excitement, a life of conversation, a life in which you kept meeting people who made you think. To the extent that she’d had that life, it hadn’t been one that Daniel had been interested in sharing; it had been one she’d had to find for herself.
    Sometimes she thought that Daniel’s rival wasn’t Lev, it was Manhattan. It was coming here that had made her feel alive to her own possibilities. She hadn’t been unhappy in Seattle; her job was absorbing, and she’d found a balance between being a mother, which she loved, and being a woman at work in the world. But on coming back here she’d discovered how little she’d trained herself to live with. Everything was richer here: work life, cultural life, street life—even her dream life. She didn’t know if it was even possible for her to go back.
    Tonight she couldn’t shake off her restlessness. Before they’d left the apartment, she’d felt as if she were in the wrong clothes, and she’d changed twice, but she still felt as if she were in the wrong clothes.
    Florence’s success had shaken something loose inside Janine. Florence was a woman who had never compromised. And now, at long last, she was reaping the fruits of her courage. So the question, Janine thought, is this: If I exercised a bravery in my own life equivalent to that which Florence has exercised in hers, what would I be doing? What would I be doing differently?

30
    “You think you could live here again?” she said.
    “Saint Mark’s Place?”
    “You know what I mean. New York.”
    “We’d never be able to afford it. We’d have to live out in Brooklyn, with my father. Cozy times around the fire with Saul. We could read his masterpieces as soon as they came out of the typewriter.”
    “Wherever. You know what I mean. Could you see yourself coming back east?”
    They could do it, if the will was there.