A Small Indiscretion (26 page)

At the clinic, we went to the window and gave them my name. They didn’t ask for his name, only his money. It was my ordeal, apparently. It was my child. Did I think of you as a child? At least a part of me did. I may have worked hard to shrug off my Catholic training, but I had not been entirely successful. Inside me, very much alive, were reminders I would have preferred right then to forget. Bloody posters held up by protesters in front of clinics. Words, warnings, debates. The tricky question: When does life
begin? Trying to reason it out is like trying to imagine what existed before the universe. There is a point at which human intelligence falls short. It’s one of the reasons I hate an election year. All those debates. All that certainty. It seems so frail to me. It seems pointless, and even fraudulent, to pretend to have answers to unanswerable questions. I could not persuade myself that the life inside me was not a life. I could imagine a baby readily enough. A fetus that, uninterrupted, would grow eyes and eyelashes and limbs and fingers and toes. It would open its eyes and they would be blue, like your father’s.

On the other hand, there were all the things I had put in my body since the night the condom slipped—hash and liquor and dirty river water—that might have given you brain damage. I felt an intolerable rush of guilt and regret. You had begun with the potential to become a perfectly formed being, and now you were impaired. Was that a reason to terminate you? Such a terrible word,
terminate
. A word from a brave new world in which only the flawless are allowed to be born. And here I was, your mother, your protector, the one to introduce the possibility of flaws. Now I was about to heap sin upon sin. I was about to pay for my appetites with a tiny life.

But maybe none of this is true. Maybe I wasn’t thinking any of that. Maybe I was thinking that if I kept you, your father would marry me, and I would become a doctor’s wife. I would never have to go home again. And where was home, anyway? A condominium in Burbank directly beneath the flight path of an airport. What was the future there? A degree from a community college. A career like my mother’s career. A life like my mother’s life.

On the other hand, a doctor’s wife. What did I imagine such a woman might look like? What would she do with her days? I imagined walks across the city in expensive clothes. I imagined tennis, or possibly sailing. Long lunches, during which I would drink iced tea
and stare out at the boats in the bay, battling the wind under the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m not sure my vision included a child at all. Or if it did, it was a stylized version, a cartoon baby with bright eyes and round red cheeks, stashed away somewhere while I conquered the city.

I sat in the clinic and began to imagine a bargain. In this bargain, I would promise to be good. I would give up drinking. I would stop being impulsive and selfish. I would stop thinking of Patrick. I would be faithful to Jonathan in mind and in deed. Instead of oblivion, I would seek equanimity and purity of purpose. I would strike out on a new path and forge a new kind of life. I would save the child inside me from termination, and in exchange for my goodness, that child would be born free of imperfections, with all his fingers and toes and mental faculties intact. It’s not so different from the bargain I made again last August, when I spewed out my confession and broke your father’s heart. I faced my sins, and promised to be good, and hoped to be forgiven.

In the clinic that day, I didn’t say any of what I was thinking out loud. I sat next to your father and filled out the forms and turned them back in at the counter.

We didn’t have long to wait. They called my name and I took a step forward. I gave your father a weak smile.

He stood up. He took me by the elbow and sat me down again. He spoke in a low, tender voice, the voice I had until then heard him use only in bed. “You know what?” he said. “I think we could handle this.”

“Handle what?”

“Having a baby. Getting married. All that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“But do you want to?”

“I do. I really do. If you will.”

We left the clinic. We took another cab, back to the diner. I ordered another hamburger, but it was too late. The interval between meals was too long, and I was too sick now to swallow. I sipped a glass of water. Your father ordered a pastrami sandwich and wolfed it down. There was a red vintage gumball machine next to the hostess stand. He stood up and put a quarter in it and turned, but nothing came out. He tried again, but again, he had no luck. The hostess had disappeared, so he walked back to the kitchen and returned with a screwdriver. He pried off the red metal lid and set it on the ground. I watched from the booth as he burrowed down with his hand, pulling out prize after prize, each encased in a clear plastic capsule with a blue top. Finally he held a prize up to the light, then slipped it into his pocket. He screwed the lid back on the gumball machine. He returned to me and bent down on his knees beside the booth and fished the plastic capsule out of his pocket. He popped the blue lid off. Inside was a ring.

He asked for my hand. I gave it to him.

“That’s the wrong hand,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

I extended my left hand. The cheap metal band of the ring was painted a bright gold. There was a stone—an imitation diamond. It was very large. The band was not solid but open on one side, so the size could be adjusted.

Your father slipped the ring onto my finger. He squeezed the band hard, until the metal was pinching my skin. We laughed a little, a high, private laugh at the absurdity of it all. He lifted my hand up and kissed the ring. He leaned in and kissed me on the lips. He pressed his forehead against my forehead.

“Will you marry me?” he whispered.

He kept his forehead crushed against mine, and his face was so
close to my face, it was as if I swallowed the question as soon as he posed it. I felt our held breaths as the words burrowed down inside me, where you were burrowing, too, so small but so certain, and where, right beside you, an answer had already been waiting.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll marry you.”

PART II

S
ATURDAY MORNING
. The girls will be home from Wisconsin tomorrow. Before they arrive, I’ll hide everything again in the hatbox, then I’ll return it to the hall closet. Between now and then, I wonder, can these artifacts carry the story? They say a picture paints a thousand words; do you need so many more words than that?

The hatbox came into my possession when I purchased an off-white silk pillbox hat with a little veil in the spring of 1990 at a bridal store on Union Street. It was a bizarre headpiece for a young bride, in retrospect, but I suppose I felt a full white virgin veil would be too much, given my condition. Taped to the inside of the hatbox, still, is an envelope in which the store clerk placed the receipt for the hat. I’ve never looked at it. I’ve never needed to, because I remember how much it cost—seventy-eight dollars—much more than I wanted to spend, but an extravagance I allowed myself because I had money left over from the check my mother had sent me to buy a wedding dress, which I managed to purchase at a secondhand shop.

The hat has long since been given to Goodwill, but the hatbox has endured. It’s like the keep in Canterbury, the place for things that
need to be hidden from invaders. The first thing I put in it, as I recall, was the sealed envelope in which I’d placed the notes from Patrick. The second was the toy ring in its clear plastic shell—fished from the gumball machine the day your father proposed—which he promptly replaced with a cubic zirconium, another placeholder, he promised, until he could afford a real diamond.

What came after that?

A wedding. A wedding certificate. A wedding photo.

The photo is of the whole wedding gathering, posed informally in front of your father’s mother’s cabin on Washington Island, Wisconsin, no more than twenty people, half in shadow, half in sun, crowded around the two of us sitting on a chair made from cedar logs, me with my arms folded across my ribs. I stare at it now as if seeing it for the first time. My dress, with its empire waist, in cream-colored silk. The bouquet of wildflowers picked that morning from the field next to the house. My hair pulled back, the pillbox hat pinned on my head, the veil obscuring the green of my eyes. My ears below the hat adorned with the little pearl earrings that had belonged to my mother. My arms trying to conceal my six-month bump. The dark suit your father wore, the one he’d bought himself when he graduated from medical school the spring before. The cedars towering over us in witness. The lake in the distance, roughed up by wind. Jonathan’s mother, who died when you were a baby, smiling her wild smile. Her cheekbones like small round apples, her gray hair plunked haphazardly into a bun and stuck through with chopsticks. The faint smell I can remember coming off her of incense and patchouli. Her friends gathered behind, old hippie ladies dressed in denim and burlap and gauze. My mother smiling a set Jell-O smile in her lime-green suit, her shoes dyed to match. A half-dozen of your father’s friends from high school and college and medical school—hearty, clean-cut, intelligent boys drinking the
local beer. I hadn’t invited any of my friends from home. It was too far to travel, and I was embarrassed that I was pregnant.

There were no fathers in attendance. Jonathan’s father had never married his mother or been part of Jonathan’s life in the first place, and when Jonathan was ten, he’d died. I had not invited mine.

As a wedding present, Jonathan’s mother, Catherine, gave us fifty thousand dollars, an amount that astonished us both. It was money she’d inherited from her own parents but never spent.

“Buy a house,” she said. “A tangible asset. You can never go wrong with a tangible asset.”

There is a copy of the check in the hatbox. And there is a copy of the cashier’s check I received from my father a week after the wedding. Not a wedding gift, but the balance of the money he owed me, plus a little extra. My father had signed the check, but I wondered if it was not his money, but Veronica Cox’s.

At first I hadn’t informed my father of the wedding at all. I could not bear to imagine what he might think of an idea as outrageous and outdated as getting married because of a pregnancy. Had I not been informed that my generation had been liberated from that particular last resort? Why was I hell-bent on repeating history when history itself had provided a way out? What was the point of the protests and upheavals of his generation if the next one was not going to make use of hard-earned progress?

I had no good answers to the questions I projected onto him. It would not do to claim I wanted to be a doctor’s wife. It would not do, either, to describe the way I was drawn to Jonathan, and he to me. Or to explain the bargain I’d struck in the clinic on that bright winter day. It would not even do to tell my father I was in love. Which I was quite convincingly, and still am, though Jonathan no longer believes it, and my love may no longer be returned.

Why did I expend worry about what my father might think?
After all, he was the one who had disappointed me. He was the one who had dodged rehab and abandoned his family. He was the one who had let the IRS suck my life savings away and promised to send a wire to London but never did. He was the one who let Christmas come and go without a word. He was the one who was about to marry another woman. I knew all this to be true, but I could not feel its truth inside me. All I could feel was the awfulness of shattering the vision he’d had of my future, even though that vision had never been especially well defined.

I finally did send him a letter explaining that I was getting married and having a baby. I’m not sure I actually invited him to the wedding. Probably I was afraid that if I asked him to walk me down the aisle he would say no, he couldn’t make the trip from Maine. Or he would say yes, then not show up. Or he would show up and try to talk me out of it. Or he would come and be generous, and kind, and false.

So I didn’t ask. And he didn’t come.

Then he sent the money, and I sent it back. Why make a copy of the cashier’s check, and, more important, why send it back? It wasn’t that I had forgiven him; I had never had the fortitude to hold it against him in the first place. I thought I was doing a brave and noble thing. I thought the gesture of sending the money back would be received in the spirit in which I’d intended it, and that it would end the estrangement that had sprung up between us. Instead, it seemed to set that estrangement in stone.