Ed King (7 page)

“Listen,” she hissed. “I didn’t call to negotiate—that’s not what’s going on here. Do you think I’m one of your stupid clients? This is the girl you got up the duff, Walter, this is me, Diane Burroughs, calling on behalf of your illegitimate son. This is about your
son
, you bloody arse, and what I want is
more
than reasonable when you think of it in terms of child support.”

He couldn’t argue and didn’t argue. It wasn’t his show: he could see that. So instead he said—after peeking into empty adjoining cubicles—that he only wanted the best for her, that he had never wanted anything but the best for her, and that, no matter what, he would always do his part. In short, he fed Diane the same lines he’d fed her for months, which,
it turned out, had gotten him exactly nowhere. “Shut up,” said Diane, “and send the money.”

After putting down the receiver, Walter shook his head for a long time. “I’m an idiot,” he thought. “What just happened? And the whole time I thought I was smarter than her! Come on, Walter, clean up your act. Get a grip, buddy. Grow up—it’s time. You’re lucky this mistake didn’t blow up in your face. Lucky to get out of it alive.”

Certain nurses in Diane’s maternity ward doubled as self-appointed counselors. If a nurse was prone to even ordinary sympathies, much might incite her in those halls of extremes—stillbirth, say, or a pregnancy that ended in sterility, or a newborn with a handicap or harelip. Often it was just the birth of a baby whose mother hadn’t meant to get pregnant; on other occasions the mother held in her arms the product of her rape. Then there were the girls like Diane Burroughs, children who’d been kept under wraps until the end of their interludes as embodiments of shame. The maternity nurses all knew that poor, waifish Diane had to give up her son and not see him again—ever. That she’d have to wonder, for the rest of her life, where he was and how he was faring. That she’d yearn for him. That she’d entertain fantasies about boys she saw who called him to mind. The toddler glimpsed in tow at Sears, the teen-ager mowing a lawn on the next block, the excellent young actor in the community-theater production of
Our Town—
all of them might be, in her head, her son. It was hard for most of the nurses in the ward not to sympathize with Diane, or, for that matter, with many new mothers. They couldn’t keep themselves from holding hands, doling out tissues, listening with the private
conviction that there was more to their work than medicine, and talking to new mothers with the sense that, like Florence Nightingale, they were ladies with lamps.

In Diane’s case, the lady with the lamp was named Nurse Carol, so it was Nurse Carol who succumbed to Diane’s appeal, four hours before Baby Doe’s adoptive family was to arrive, for an hour with her son. One hour and then Diane would be done and could start putting her loss behind her. One hour just to hold her baby so she could remember his face, his smell, his skin; one hour because an hour like that would help her come to terms with what was happening. What could Carol say to such a plea? There was no harm in what Diane was asking. She went to the ward, plucked up Baby Doe, brought him to Diane, and, after expressing her sorrow and hope, left and shut the door.

Diane had it all minutely orchestrated. She’d made Walter, the day before, haul her junior suitcase to her beater car and leave it in the trunk beside its larger partner. She’d gotten her things down to where they fit in half a grocery bag. Now all she had to do was wait until things quieted in the hallway. Meanwhile, Diane cooed at Baby Doe. She put her nose to his and said, “Hi there,” softly. She drank him in up close and rocked him. Her son looked rather like her half-brother John—he had John’s constabulary brow, nose, and chin—but his green eyes were more like her half-brother Club’s. Did he look like Club or did he look like John? She hoped he’d be more like Club than John, because John was dense, and Club was charismatic. Who else did he look like? Did he look like her? Diane held him out, carefully, at arm’s length, the better to observe his features while he hung there. She decided that one day he’d have powerful shoulders. Plus, his birth height was in the seventy-fifth percentile, so he was going to be tall, and, she could see—after all, she was his mother—very,
very
handsome. All of this without forgetting the important point: that she hadn’t planned on being a sixteen-year-old unwedded mum, especially not of a child whose father was Walter Cousins. Nevertheless, she opened her blouse for her son, and let him take her nipple for whatever he could get—she gave him both breasts, and held him with affection. Then, after buttoning up and getting on her coat, she put a folded sweater in her half-full grocery bag, gently set her baby on top of it, and, carrying the bag against her chest, went out to the parking lot.

Down the road three miles, Diane pulled over in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. The coast was clear, so she went to the trunk for a suitcase, emptied it, lined it with her coat, propped it open on the passenger seat, and settled her baby inside. In his intermittently loud company, she drove south, because north lay Canada and, maybe, a border request for her nonexistent driver’s license, and east and west lay, respectively, mountains and water. South it was, then, at a steady, modest clip. Leaving the freeway once for gas, once for nappies, pins, a terry-cloth washcloth, and baby powder, and once for a baby bottle and a quart of milk—which she had no way to warm other than to leave it by the car heater—Diane obeyed every American driving law. When her baby cried, she felt anxious and ill-equipped. Twice she pulled over to put the bottle’s rubber nipple in his mouth, twice to change his nappy and toss his old one in the weeds, and twice to burp him with soft jolts to the back, which she thought was proper technique. Too bad, she thought, that her au-pair year hadn’t included infants. She’d have to do what she thought was right and hope for the best. She turned on the radio, talked to her baby, stroked his head with one hand, and worked the steering wheel with the other, all the while fretting about being pulled over, because, it occurred to her, not only was she driving without a license, she also couldn’t produce a birth certificate if asked, just a passport with an expired visa. What she did have, though, was $250, and a plan.

That afternoon, in Portland, Oregon—in the wrong part of town—Diane paid cash for a motel room rife with spiders and saturated with tobacco. She got herself installed in this squalid fleabag, removed both hospital ID bands—her own and the baby’s—changed another nappy, worked the bottle, watched television, took a shower, and then, for the umpteenth time already, burped her son—who spat up on her, wailing—and slept when he did. In the morning, bleary, she bought a twin packet of cupcakes and ate them with chocolate milk in the car. Well into afternoon, she drove broad circuits, surveying Portland, while the baby, swaddled in his suitcase-nest, rode shotgun with, unfortunately, distress, odors, and complaints. Portland seemed smaller than Seattle, but leafier and just as prosperous. There were plenty of grand Victorian homes in neighborhoods where the streets were shaded by large trees, but also plenty of dutifully kept ranch houses like the Cousins home in Seattle. Diane cruised neighborhoods with an eye toward their amenities before
renting a post-office box in Sullivan’s Gulch, not far from Lloyd Center, a new shopping center. She wanted to go inside Lloyd Center and have a look around, but instead, with her baby on her arm, she went into a battered-looking secondhand store and bought him a wicker basket, a blue baby blanket, a grow suit, and corduroy booties. Lloyd Center would have to wait.

That night, Diane parked her beater beneath a streetside elm in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, where she could see downhill a long way. For an hour and a half she watched the scene in front of her and in her rearview mirror. People came and went, cars pulled in and out, lights went on, lights went off, people walked with dogs on leashes, a cat prowled cryptically. Around nine-thirty, Diane selected the third house from the end on the east side of the block, a large, red-bricked Tudor with tall hedges. Now came the hard part—the disturbing crux of the deed. She got out, looked around, collected herself with one deep breath, then opened the passenger door and gathered up the wicker basket containing her sleeping son, who was tucked into his blue blanket and warmly dressed in his baby grow and booties. As calmly as she could, but steadily, she walked down the sidewalk through intervals of yard lamplight that illuminated her son’s perfect face. And it
was
perfect. Why was her son so perfect? She looked, alternately, at him and at the Tudor. From its front window, a purple light emanated; the people inside, she understood, were watching TV. TV watchers in a red brick Tudor were going to have to do the right thing. “Okay,” Diane thought, “this is it,” and then, suddenly welling up, she climbed the stairs and left her son on the stoop.

It was bitter-hard. But, driving off, she bucked up within minutes. The TV watchers, upstanding people who lived in a good home in a good neighborhood, would squire Baby Doe to the next step along his way. All he had to do was cry how he did and they would give him what he needed and take him where he needed to go. And that left her free now—free, foremost, to call that toff Walter on Monday morning and bleed him for everything he was bloody worth. For now though, she returned to her dingy quarters, where she passed a night equal in sleeplessness to the one before it, if for different reasons. Her baby kept her awake not with intermittent squalls but with his absence.

The following afternoon, with Walter on the hook, a bag of chocolates beside her, the television for company, and a pillow behind her head,
Diane sat on her motel bed circling rooms for rent in the
Journal
. She looked at the comics, did the crossword puzzle, and read “Hints from Heloise” and “Dear Abby.” Below the fold in the local section she came across the headline police seek parents of abandoned baby. No witnesses or clues were mentioned in the story. The infant was in the care of the Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon. Diane felt relieved to know that Baby Doe was settled. Her plan was a success.

Two days later, on a sunny morning, standing in the post-office foyer, she tore open Walter’s first installment with giddy pleasure, counted and then folded his fresh bills into a fat wad, noted with interest but not disappointment the absence of a note or letter, then walked down the street and leased a safety-deposit box at a branch of Portland Trust and Savings. The next day, she took a furnished room in Sullivan’s Gulch, dank and dreadful but dirt-cheap, and certainly no worse than what she’d known growing up. Determined to save what she could on rent, she shared a bathroom with other tenants and cooked soup and oatmeal on a hotplate. The landlord didn’t ask for references or a damage deposit, and the building was in walking distance of her post-office box. Lloyd Center was a bit of a trek, but the weather was fair, the days were long, and she had time, suddenly, to do as she pleased, which meant reading in bed all morning if she felt like it, sitting in a cinema in the middle of the afternoon, eating in restaurants, and shopping. Diane, settled in, sent Club her mailing address, saying, “Write to me here—I’ve gone a bit south.” A month later, he replied with a postcard from Liverpool depicting, in sepia, its long-ago canning dock. “Scraggy-neck,” it read. “Right enough for the moment. Studying electrical from mail order manuals. Wouldn’t mind putting to sea as a joiner, something in an engine room, thank you please, what I would like is electrical greaser, out of the wind, where it’s snug.” In a second paragraph he asked, “What’s all this with them thrashing up their Negroes? Cattle prods and hoses? God save the Queen, Luv!—Club.”

Lloyd Center was American and fantastic. At a kiosk, she counted one hundred shops and read a sign claiming that no shopping center in America was larger. There was an ice rink with a viewing balcony. Lipman’s sold fine apparel for women, as did Meier & Frank. Diane spent a lot of time combing the racks, contemplating the displays of fashionable clothing, and trying things on in tiny dressing rooms. Everything was a
no-go—even though she was snapping back from pregnancy—but she still liked rhythmically sliding the dresses, skirts, and blouses on their hangers, pulling out a possibility, eyeing it critically, checking the price tag, assessing the fabric, reading the label, and slipping it back in place before rifling, once more, through the rack. If she lingered long enough, a floor clerk might come round to suggest the girls’ department for a proper fit. There were a lot of tucked bodices, and gloves for evening wear, and seersucker suits, and dozens of variations on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox hat, but none of that seemed right to Diane. What seemed right was a look she came across while passing the toy department at J. C. Penney: Blonde Ponytail Barbie, in a maroon velvet sleeveless top and a white satin skirt, complete with glossy lips, painted fingernails, and maroon wedges.

Three weeks later, costumed as Blonde Ponytail Barbie, Diane sat in the tea shop on the tenth floor of the downtown Lipman’s, eating tuna casserole and, with a pencil, designing a business card on a napkin. A week later, after picking up a hundred freshly printed cards at a stationer’s, she bought a handbag, earrings, necklace, bracelet, and watch. These were of good quality, as was her hairdo—glossy, with bangs—which she’d paid an expensive dresser to put together. On a side street, in her mildewed beater, Diane adorned herself with the jewelry, tucked a dozen of the fresh cards into her handbag, and made a last assessment in her rearview mirror. Then, wearing a straight face, she got out on the passenger side, looking, she hoped, supremely confident.

Diane walked down Eleventh drawing glances. At the Seward Hotel, with no hesitation, she glided through the door held open for her and sat in the lobby with her legs crossed, as if she belonged there, under the rustic chandeliers, the gilded archways, and the murals depicting the Lewis and Clark Expedition. For a half-hour, she monitored the front desk and the concierge stand, the comings and goings of the bellboys with their carts of luggage, and the Seward’s guests, with their gaiety, fine clothes, and need for taxis. The concierge, in a tight serge suit, with a scarlet face and a walrus mustache, stood at a kind of podium. Diane, after smoothing down her velvet top and brushing at her satin skirt, approached him, half curtsied as part of her act, and said, “Pardon me. I wonder if I might inquire.”