Ed King (9 page)

She opened her little handbag, produced her silver pen, and wrote her name—Diane Burroughs—and phone number on the back of a Lipman’s receipt. “As opposed to a glass slipper,” she said, before stuffing it into the breast pocket of Jim’s blazer. “But then, this is reality.”

Jim, she soon found, had a beautiful family. His parents, Nelson and Isobel, warmed immediately to their son’s new British girlfriend—Nelson in particular, who looked like a butler, with his thin upper lip and gleaming pate. Nelson had been stationed, during the war, at Debden, where he “grew fond of the English,” but, more to the point, he told Diane, where he met plenty of English girls who looked and sounded like her. “Ergo,” he added, winking, “I can’t help but associate you with that period in my life, which was so stimulating and formative.” Isobel said that Nelson had a photo album in the attic with pictures in it of the pretty English bachelorettes he’d dated while she herself was finding dates few and far between, because all the young men were overseas. But how wonderful it had been when they came home in ’45, and she’d had the pleasure of dating “a host” before meeting Nelson at Sun Valley Lodge on New Year’s Eve of ’46. It had just reopened after having served, for the duration, as a war hospital. They’d skied together for three blissful days.

The Longs, in concert, embraced Diane as right for Jim. Within a month she was an integral part of this prominent ski clan’s relentless social calendar. Jim’s brothers—Rob, Tom, Will, and Trip—all resembled each other, though Jim was the most fit, and Tom, the youngest, and a bachelor like Jim, had by far the most hair. The married men were varyingly flirtatious with Diane but uniformly cautious and unthreatening; Tom, the baby of the family and its self-appointed rebel, was too self-involved to see anything in Diane except, she sensed, what he wanted to see—namely, English decoration. Jim’s older sister, Sue, was married to the president of sales at a company that built long-haul trucks, and his younger sister, Lynn, was a Tri Delt at U of O who took easily to her role as Diane’s default roommate when the Longs descended on Timberline Lodge, or stayed overnight at the Hilton in Eugene after a Ducks game and its consequent revels. Lynn wore a billowing auburn ponytail, and in
hotel rooms liked to sit on her bed drinking rum-and-Cokes, talking about sex, and goading Diane to be revealing about her love life: what she’d done or hadn’t done, what she was thinking about doing next, if it was true that foreign guys were better in bed—especially French guys—if she liked lingerie and, if so, what kind, and, eventually, if she could keep secrets. And then there were the secrets themselves—for example, that Lynn had been on the pill until the weight gain and headaches got to be too much (now she had an IUD that was only borderline comfortable and might have to be refitted), and that she’d lost her virginity during high school but had since then slept with just one guy besides the guy she was sleeping with now, who was better at it than either of the other guys.

Jim was only mildly aggressive when it came to his need for sex. Diane let him inside her bra early on but drew the line at her panties until, after three months of dating, he gave her a garnet ring one evening in a seafood restaurant—an “I’m in love with you” ring, as he called it. That night she didn’t stop his southward-moving fingers, which, on reaching their destination, flailed away at high speed. Unable to respond to Jim’s overzealous efforts, Diane emitted a few fake ecstatic squeals while clenching her buttocks, after which he whispered, “My turn.” His turn took no more than thirty seconds, and ended with him gasping, “Holy Jesus.” Henceforth a swift approach kept Jim maintained—après-ski, post-golf or post-swimming, or at the end of long hours at Long Alpine headquarters, he did what he did for Diane, and then she did what she did for him. She did it without complaint, but also as if it were not her favorite thing in life, not exactly a necessary evil but also not exactly something she looked forward to.

It wasn’t hard to steer Jim toward a marriage proposal. If he wanted to think of himself as a hero who was improving things on the golf course and in Vietnam, fine, because Diane could play his lady in distress without thinking about it, be the princess in the long satin dress who was always pulling its embroidered hem higher to go up and down stairs, the lovely girl in one of those tall, conical, pointy hats with the sheer veil attached to it who was also excellent on horseback. She could be what she knew he wanted her to be: chipper, bright, British in affect, sparkling, effusive, charming, sexy (but sexy without going overboard into slutty, and without suggesting dark and dangerous). She gave him the whole act, everything he needed, and after a year—he had it marked to the
day—he got down on one knee, brought out a diamond ring, said what he had to say—to which she at once said yes—and finally, since Diane had led him to believe that she was parentless because of a car accident when she was seven, asked whom he should contact for permission. Diane just giggled, kissed his cheek, slid a hand down his pants, and said, “I’m all the permission you’ll ever need, Jim.”

The next morning, with Jim in the bag, she fended off phone calls from a succession of Long women who wanted to talk about wedding plans. The outlines emerged of a Congregational church ceremony to be followed by festivities at the Riverside Club, the details of which, in the ensuing months, she felt no need to put her stamp on. When the big day arrived, Diane found herself covered to the throat in virginal white and hauling about a train of female Longs: Jim’s two sisters, three sisters-in-law, and a niece strewing flower petals as the extensive Republican gathering in the pews smiled about how cute she looked. In front of them all, trying hard to appear poised, Diane put a gold band on Jim’s thick ring finger. His kiss-the-bride kiss was tender, not acquisitive; friendly, not lusty. On their way down the aisle as man and wife, he nodded, waved, and shook hands with happy force. Then they were alone, momentarily, in an anteroom, where he exclaimed, “Jesus, we did it!”

It was May of 1972. In a brand-new Olds 442 convertible, Mr. and Mrs. Long motored to a lodge on Cannon Beach for a simple honeymoon (to be followed by a three-week tour of Italy that Jim couldn’t work into his schedule until June). That night, with an uncorked bottle of champagne and two new glasses, and Diane decked out in the red lingerie Jim gave her, they moved beyond digital manipulations. Jim wasn’t bad—a little bland, a little hurried—but his rubber had the wrong ring size, and after it came off inside her, she couldn’t get it out. In the morning she sent him for a package of cotton swabs because she still couldn’t retrieve it. With Jim away on this husbandly mission, she got up, peed, and went out on the veranda so she could look at and smell the ocean. A seagull prodded something below her in the sand, and after a while she realized it was a plastic bag. That seemed sad and unromantic, a reminder of the bleakness of life on earth, which was how she often saw things when alone, and which led her, inevitably, to think of her son. Gravity, or maybe peeing, made some kind of difference, because suddenly she felt able to extract Jim’s rubber, and went in and did so, much to her relief, since if it stayed
any longer it might incite a yeast infection. Again on the veranda, she saw there were more gulls, and on a whim dropped the rubber in their squabbling midst before looking up and down the wide beach. To the south, a family was on a morning constitutional, Mum and Dad holding hands, their boy and girl trotting in arcs along the wet part of the strand. Every once in a while, the boy dashed into the surf. Finally, he fell and tottered up, wet. This made Diane think again of her son, who would be nine now, nine and a month. For all she knew, that was him below, wringing out his shirt and looking stunned.

The people in the Eastmoreland neighborhood who found Diane’s baby on their stoop were the Crofters, Arnie and Stacy. There was a troubling noise just outside their front door—Stacy thought it might be clashing cats—which caused Arnie, since he could no longer ignore her or it, to turn down the volume on
The Nurses
. Standing by the TV with his hands on his hips, he said, “Shhhh,” a little angrily, because Stacy was blowing her nose into a handkerchief. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Quiet!” Arnie answered. They regarded each other with bitter familiarity. “Something isn’t right,” Arnie observed.

All Arnie had to do was go outside and look, but he hesitated, hoping the noise would resolve itself so they could get back to
The Nurses
, and Stacy beat him to it. She threw open the door and, after gasping, said, “Arn!” By the time he got there, she had a crying baby in her arms and was whispering to it, warming it against her chest, rocking it, and patting its back. “Poor baby,” she said. “It’s a
baby
.”

Arnie answered, “Wait a second.”

He stood on the stoop and scrutinized the block. Then, spurred by what he recognized as a closing window of opportunity to find out who
had abandoned a baby, he hurried to the sidewalk and looked more thoroughly. There was no one walking, running, or driving away, just the same old quiet street, still, as always, after dark.

Arnie went in, dialed the police, and said, “Uh, the strangest thing just happened right now—someone left a baby on our porch.” Then he and Stacy sat on the couch, taking turns holding it. There was the ammonia smell, emanating from a diaper, that Arnie, at fifty-eight, remembered from his own kids, and that made him hand the baby back to Stacy. He went to wash his hands, and when he came back, Stacy was talking soothingly to it, calling it, over and over, “you poor, poor thing,” and “you poor little baby,” asking it, “Are you better now?” and apologizing by saying, “I’d change your diaper if I had one around, but I don’t anymore, you little sweetheart.”

Arnie said, “This is unbelievable.”

“Look at his little blue blanket,” answered Stacy. “It’s a boy.”

They leaned in to enjoy the little foundling together. Their own kids were both married, but there were no grandchildren yet. Stacy said, “This guy is really, really
darling
.”

“He’s cute,” agreed Arnie, “but what baby isn’t? When did you see a baby you didn’t say was cute, you pushover?”

“Just
darling
,” Stacy answered. “Who would
do
a thing like this?” She stroked the baby’s chin. She smelled his hair.

Arnie stroked the baby’s chin, too—their hands alternated. “Unbelievable,” he answered. “Someone not right in the head, I guess. Their own
baby
.”

Stacy slid her index finger into the baby’s fist. “Wow,” she said. “My, my, sweetheart. Strong boy.”

“He does look strong. Look how thick his neck is.”

“This is really sad,” said Stacy.

They sat there, asking questions and admiring the boy, until two policemen arrived. After a series of radio and phone calls, one of them finally took the baby from Stacy’s arms and returned it to its basket, where it wailed. Stacy wanted to explain to these young men what the baby needed, but the whole thing was so sad now that she was rendered mute by it, and could only watch from the stoop while one of the policemen carried the basket out, put it on the back seat of his patrol car, and shut the door, not gently. Stacy’s eyes welled. She nodded silently at the
officers while they said their farewells. “That’s what happens,” she told Arnie later. “That’s the world. Someone leaves a baby out in the cold, next a cop slams a door in his face.”

“Okay,” said Arnie.

“That poor kid ought to be nursing right now instead of riding downtown in a cop car. I mean, Arn, come on, tell me, where is God at a time like this? All these people blabbing how God has a plan, it’s all for the best, we shouldn’t try to understand—well, no, I
don’t
understand. A God who lets stuff like
this
happen—what kind of God is
that
?”

Arnie said, while reaching for his pipe, “I don’t know. You do the best you can, I guess, and the rest is out of your hands.”

“What kind of God?” repeated Stacy.

The Boys and Girls Aid Society of Oregon Home on Powell Boulevard Southeast was staffed by women who believed, based partly on intuition and partly on research, that an orphanage should feel like a home. This was fortunate for the abandoned boy handed over to them by the Portland Police Department, who in the Infant Cottage was lavished with attention. Loving women nurtured waifs like him around the clock until they could be placed in foster homes or adopted. In other words, in the first weeks of his life, the son of Diane Burroughs and Walter Cousins had the copious and intimate contact with women recommended for infants by psychologists. He didn’t have this sort of contact with just one woman, or achieve the kind of bonding with one woman that was considered, also by psychologists, essential to well-being; instead, there were five women, attentive, trained, and committed to their work, who held him, spoke to him, fed him from a bottle, looked him in the eyes, swaddled his bottom, and, when he cried, soothed him with the right intonations. Administered to thusly, he thrived, reaping the benefits of advanced child-care theory. He was prized, cuddled, rocked, and sung to. As the youngest ward of the state on the premises, he led a princeling’s life, attended by adoration. The story of his abandonment provoked maternalism in his caretakers and played on their sympathies. None of them wanted the poor, unwanted child who had no name to fall through the cracks or endure the tiniest deprivation. He was, they felt, so young that it was not too late for their compassionate ministrations. Bad influences
hadn’t impaired him, as they’d impaired so many of the older kids in the home. He could be set on the right path by the power of their loving-kindness. And, since a nameless child was too abstract to function as the right vessel for their feelings, they dubbed him, at first, “our little lost lamb,” and then, for short, “Little.”

A singular and fantastic season for Little. Eleven and a half weeks of the royal treatment, including a lot more warm milk than he needed and a lot of talcum powder between the waist and knees. Little quickly developed chin blubber and passed his waking hours in a satisfied dolor that smelled of Breck, Crest, Yardley of London, egg-salad sandwiches, and Diet Rite.
Then, one day, out of nowhere, he was dressed too warmly and carried outside by his new adoptive mother, Alice King, who afterward would always associate the smell of roses with his first hour in her arms. This was because not far from her car door were wildly proliferating coral-colored blooms, long-thorned and red-tipped, with a thick, tangy scent. They were so beautiful and perfect she wanted to have one to dry and press in a keepsake book, and so, with her free hand, she reached for a likely flower, one with time left on it, thinking she might twist it free or bend it over a fingernail. Instead, she was painfully pricked in her thumb, which she withdrew and sucked. A single dark drop of her blood, she saw, had fallen on, and stained, her new baby’s blanket. This seemed to her an unhappy omen, and she said as much to her husband, Dan. “You don’t believe in omens,” he reminded her.