Crossroads (5 page)

And when there were clashes between Gwen and Cassandra—and inevitably there were, because they were mother and daughter, and because each in her own way was strong—Walter was the one who made peace. Walter, who appreciated them both, could point out to Gwen that Cassandra was actually showing her affection when she seemed domineering and overbearing, and he could tell Cassandra that Gwen was merely being determined like her mother when she dug in her heels so stubbornly. There were times when Gwen couldn’t believe how lucky they were to have Walter. She knew her mother felt the same way.

But then there were other times. Times when no matter what anyone said—including Walter—Gwen felt she was not pretty enough, or smart enough. Times when she felt . . . no, she
knew
she just wasn’t good enough.

*                           *                           *         

Gwen shifted her position on the stump and a chipmunk fled, frightened, into his hole.
Poor thing! I wonder what’s going
through his mind? Does he have a mind in the sense that I understand
that? Does he think the way I do? Is it the same kind of
process? I’m sure a biologist—a scientist with graphs and microscopes
for measuring things exactly—would say no. But do the scientists
have all the answers? I’m afraid I don’t think so. If you look at
it, that chipmunk and I are the same. We both want to be fed; if it’s
too cold or too hot we don’t like it; we want to be comfortable. And
we both get frightened. We are afraid of different things, but it is the
fear itself that neither of us wants. We are afraid of being afraid.

So what does the chipmunk think about? When I was a child I
used to ask that. I used to wonder why animals don’t fight the way
humans do. They do fight, of course, but it’s for important things like
food or territory or mating rights. I’ve never seen a squirrel go after a
rabbit just to inflict pain. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a squirrel
fight a rabbit. At least, not here. I guess they have enough food
and shelter here.

Why do people fight? Why do we say nasty things to each other, or
behind each other’s back? Or perhaps just stare and say nothing?
Why do we want to hurt each other? And I’m not exempt from that.
I get angry. God knows I get jealous. So what are we all thinking?
Why do we do the things we do?

When a woman takes in a baby, does she do it because she wanted
one so desperately? Was she happy because she got to make a choice?
That’s what most adoptive parents say—
“I was lucky because I got to choose you and you were the perfect baby for me.”
My mother
has never said that. She cares for me, I feel it. But she’s never said,
I loved you from the moment I saw you. You were the only child I could ever dream of wanting.

And what happened to the woman who gave birth to me? Why
did she give me up? What about my father, did he agree that I should
be given away? Did he even know about me? Are they still out there
somewhere? Why am I thinking about this? Why does everything always
lead me back to this question? Who were my birth parents, and
what were they like? I can’t help feeling that Mother knows something
about them, but she won’t admit it. She doesn’t even want to
talk about it. If I were to ask her she’d say,
Gwen, why go into all of that?
Once when I pushed her about it, she said,
When I adopted you, I didn’t see any reason to ask a lot of questions about your past.
But she was picking her words very carefully. Mother doesn’t
lie, not really, but when she’s not telling the whole truth she’s careful
with her words. Or maybe I just want to believe she knows more
than she does. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Such were Gwen’s thoughts, and she did the best she could with them.

Chapter Seven

T
here was a big bay window in the back of the living room, Cassandra liked to take her early morning coffee there where she could watch the hill behind the house as it slowly came alive. So she had seen Gwen make her solitary journey to the place beneath the trees which had been her refuge since she was a child.

And in so many ways she still is a child. She is so vulnerable, so defenseless.
She will let herself be intimidated by a flashy little piece of
work like that Jewel Fairchild from the glassworks. That girl is all
surface and show, but Gwen doesn’t see that. She felt uncomfortable
around her because Jewel is pretty . . . all right, she’s more than pretty,
she’s beautiful . . . and she has confidence. The kind of mindless confidence
Gwen will never have because she’s too smart and sensitive.
Even when she was ten months old, the first time I saw her . . . there
was something diffident about her. As ironic as it was, I remember
thinking that she reminded me of myself.

*                           *                           *         

Cassandra turned away from the bay window. She didn’t like to live in the past, but there were times when her mind went back. Back to her first marriage and her first husband. Back to the carnage she could still imagine after all these years . . . and to the opening sentence of the headline story in a New Orleans newspaper. A sentence Cassandra could still recite by heart:
After a horrendous collision between a car and a truck, after the
shattering of glass, the roar and rumble and the screech of brakes,
a man and a woman are dead tonight.

The news had flown quickly from Louisiana to New England, and to Cassandra Wright. Her husband, whose last name no one could quite remember, was dead. He’d been in New Orleans trouble-shooting for the Wright Glassware outlet he’d opened there, and at the time of the accident he’d been giving one of the outlet employees a lift home.

The fact that such pain had fallen upon the Wright Glassworks family had not made it any more or any less tragic than any other people’s disasters, but it certainly had made it a bit more interesting in Wrightstown. For Cassandra, the pain was not what people might have expected. In some ways it was less, and in others it was much more. Or, it would become so.

Her husband’s name, the one that everyone forgot, was Bradford Curtis Greeley. Cassandra had married him for a variety of reasons; several of them, she had realized later, had not been good ones. But she was a woman who stood by her commitments and at the time of his death they had been together for ten years.

Originally she had married him because she loved him. But love for her in those days had not been a simple thing. From the time she had reached puberty her father had warned her against fortune hunters.

“You will be prey to them, Cassie,” he’d said. “Your private assets are considerable—but it is the glassworks that is the rich prize. There are many unscrupulous men who would do anything to gain control of it.”

It never seemed to occur to Father that he was suggesting that no man would pursue—or marry—Cassie for herself. Or that it would be so distasteful to marry her that it would come under the heading of “doing anything.” But that was certainly the way Cassandra heard it.

“If only you had a brother,” Father had sighed. And there it was, the big disappointment of his life. He did not have a son. There was no male heir to take over the running of the glassworks and protect dear little Cassie, who didn’t have the brains to avoid allying herself with the grasping lothario of his nightmares.

“If your mother hadn’t died so young . . .”

But Mother had died when Cassie was just a toddler, and Father had not remarried, and Cassie was an only child.

“I could structure a trust to handle your affairs but your great-grandfather and your grandfather were most specific about their desire that the glassworks not be managed by banks and trust officers.”

Thank you, Great-Grandfather and Grandfather,
Cassandra had thought.

But in spite of her attempts to see the humor in her situation, Father’s warnings about fortune hunters had borne fruit. By the time Bradford came into Cassandra’s life, she was twenty-eight years old, and not only single, but a virgin.

Her father hadn’t trusted Bradford—even though he had hired the young man to head up the woefully dated sales division at Wright Glass works.

“A bit too slick for my taste,” he’d said of his new employee. “A bit too much of the snake oil salesman. Although that may be what one wants in a ‘marketing man.’ ” Father had been suspicious of newfangled business disciplines and labels. “Give me a man who has come up through the production line,” he liked to say.

But the sales for Wright Glassware were down across the country, and Bradford, who had a marketing degree from Har-vard, had been highly recommended by several of Father’s friends. Father had signed him on—reluctantly. And Cassandra had fallen in love.

Cassandra sipped her coffee and leaned back in her chair.

So think back now, since my mind is already headed in that direction
. . . how could I have loved Bradford? Yes, he was interesting. He
was an intellectual, or was that just a pose? He was charming and
fun. But there was more.

Not only did he come from a family that was far more distinguished
than mine, he’d mentioned a trust fund—oh, so discreetly—
so I thought he had money. I thought a man who was independently
wealthy wouldn’t need to marry me for the glass works. I fell in love
with Bradford because I thought he was interested in me for myself.
I fell in love with him because he laughed at my jokes. Because he
was good-looking with his red hair, and his blue eyes. And face the
facts, I fell in love with him because Father didn’t like him.

But then she’d found out that while Bradford’s family pedigree was indeed as long as he’d said it was, there wasn’t any money. And knowing he was poor, all her father’s warnings about fortune hunters had come back to haunt her. When Bradford asked her to marry him she said no. She kept on saying it for a full year.

So why did I marry him? Because Father had died after a horrible
six-month battle with cancer, and for the first time in my life, I was
alone. Because after Father was gone there was no one to run the
glassworks, and I thought I needed a man to do it. Because Bradford
could be very persuasive. Because I was twenty-eight and tired of being
a virgin.

Not the best reasons in the world, but she’d built a marriage on them. And then Bradford had died. And as Cassandra was preparing to fly to Louisiana to bring the body home she had a phone call from a lawyer she’d never heard of whose office was in New Orleans. The man said he had handled Bradford’s affairs in New Orleans. Cassandra hadn’t known her husband had any affairs in New Orleans besides those that concerned Wright Glass works. She and the man had scheduled a meeting for the next day.

And there she was, dressed in mournful black, sitting across a desk from a middle-aged lawyer whose voice was low and whose expression was very kind.

“You know,” he said in an accent that had a slur of the South to it. “Your husband came to this city quite often.”

“Yes, on business.” There was something about the way the man was looking at her that made her uncomfortable. She heard herself start to offer an unasked-for explanation. “The outlet here in New Orleans was his idea, you see, and I’m afraid it wasn’t doing very well. My husband felt an obligation to oversee it personally, to be hands-on. . . .”

The man opposite her had shifted his eyes away. He couldn’t look at her.

“But . . . there is something else you wanted to tell me,” she said slowly. “Some other reason why he came here so often . . .”

There followed a silence that she had never forgotten. Mr. Robichaud had lowered his glance to the floor, then raised it to the bright light beyond the windows, and speaking with obvious difficulty, he said, “Life is not always what we expect, is it? Every one of us has to learn that in some way, sooner or later.”

“With all due respect, I think I’ve learned that lesson . . . especially recently.” She drew in a breath. “Please, Mr. Robichaud, tell me what else it is that I have not expected.”

“That woman—the woman in the car—she was not . . .” He trailed off, his face reddening. And then she saw it. She knew.

“She was not simply an employee . . . someone he didn’t know well. . . . He wasn’t giving her a ride to her home to be kind. . . .”

The lawyer shook his head. “No . . . She worked in the bar at the hotel where he stayed . . . and she . . . well, she . . .” He was stumbling, trying to make this easier for Cassandra—but he knew he was making it worse.

“What about her?” Cassandra had to ask it.

The man took the plunge. “My dear, sometimes a man wants a woman who isn’t of his class, who isn’t an equal. . . . Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered. In her head a voice was screaming,
I don’t deserve this! This isn’t fair!

But then she looked at the lawyer again. “There’s more, isn’t there?” she said. And the man with the kind expression, who did not want to be the bearer of bad news, nodded painfully, and looked to the floor again. “Tell me,” she commanded.

“Your husband had a child. A baby. A girl. Ten months old now.”

When he looked up at her, their eyes met. A picture flashed through her mind—of other eyes meeting and words spoken solemnly:
’Til death do us part.

“A child?” She couldn’t make sense of the word. She couldn’t get her brain to take it in. She had wanted to have children, he always said he didn’t. “A baby? His?”

“Yes,” said the lawyer. “I’m afraid there’s no mistake.”

In the hall outside the room, there were disembodied voices, too loud and cheerful: “Hello! Good to see you! You’re looking great! Some tan you’ve got there!”

Inside the room there was nothing but the screaming of the voice inside her head.

I’ve been a good wife, damnit! A loyal wife. Even with all the
doubts—and I have had them, God knows. I’ve known—deep
down—for a long time that Bradford did marry me for the business,
just the way Father said someone would. The business and the
power, and my gracious home—don’t forget that—but I told myself
he wanted me too. I told myself most marriages are a bargain and
ours was no worse than any other. Oh, the lies I’ve told myself !

“How’s your tennis game these days?” asked the cheery voice in the hall. “You should come play at my club sometime. I don’t like to brag, but our courts are the best.”

I backed him. When there was criticism of his policies at the glassworks, I refused to listen. I told the foremen and the managers and
the men who had been with my father for decades that my husband
was in charge. I said they must obey his orders. I made them respect
him! And this is how he repaid me. The woman in the car was not a
casual acquaintance. She was the mother of his child.

Something was burning on her left hand. She looked down and saw her wedding ring. The lawyer was still watching her with his kind sad eyes.

I will not cry or curse him—the man who was my husband. I will
not disgrace myself. Not for Bradford. He was what he was. A lot of
men are like him. I know that. I never wanted to know it, but now I
do.
Suddenly the ring had become too hot to stay on her finger, she pulled it off with a trembling hand, and laid it on the desk in front of her.

“I can’t . . .” She stumbled. “I don’t want it. Not another second. Would you . . . is there some charity you know here in New Orleans?”

“I could sell it for you. I could give the money to the poor box at my church.”

“Thank you.”

Mr. Robichaud really was a good man.

*                           *                           *         

Cassandra got up out of the chair and went to look out the window again. But it didn’t stop the memories. So she let her mind go back to New Orleans. To the city everyone said was so charming and colorful, but to her it would always be gray and drab.

*                           *                           *         

She hadn’t planned to see the baby—after all, it had nothing to do with her. Someone would have to take care of it, since both of its parents were dead. Who that someone might be was no concern of hers. She didn’t want to know what was going to happen to the little girl Bradford had made with his other woman.

But then the lawyer had said, “Your husband’s child has no one. None of our local agencies have been able to trace her mother’s people . . . and as for your husband . . .”

Bradford had had one sister who lived in California. She prided herself on being a moral and upright Christian woman and would have been appalled at the idea of taking in her brother’s love child.