Everybody Rise (11 page)

“Barbara. That's enough. I told you, if you want to skip the party, you can,” Dale said.

There was something especially troubling in what they had said, swirling above the upside-down idea that her father was being investigated by a grand jury, above the tension in the room, above the dreadful day that was ahead where Evelyn would either be forced to go to this party or forced to stay home with her furious parents. That was it. Newspaper accounts. If this was getting coverage, all her friends could potentially know about it already. They could've been e-mailing it around in the days since Lake James; she could practically see Nick's message: “Looks like someone's life is less perfect than she's pretending.” Camilla, too, might be a newspaper reader, and even if she wasn't, with the way everything went online and spread quickly these days, there was no controlling or predicting what would be read by whom. Evelyn would be laughed at. “This is in the papers?” she said in a small voice.

Her mother let out a high-pitched “Ha!”

Her father ran his tongue over his front teeth. “That's what papers do, Evelyn. They try to make something out of nothing.”

“In New York? New York papers aren't writing about this, right?”

“I haven't followed it that closely, honey.”

“Oh. No.” Evelyn backed a few steps away from him and from her mother, moving back toward the thick wooden door to the foyer. “Dad, you're not serious, right? This has been written about? With your name in it?”

“The newspapers are writing about pure speculation. Pure speculation.”

“Is your name in it? In the pieces?”

He squinted at her with a big grin, the one he used in summations that she had long ago termed the Bedazzler. “I don't recall whether the papers said my name or the firm's name. It doesn't matter. We all know the truth.”

“Do we?” said Barbara as Evelyn backed up a few more steps; she figured if she could just get to the door frame, she could leave without their noticing. She wanted to Google it; she didn't want to Google it. Someone would have said something to her if they'd heard about it in New York. Preston or Charlotte would've mentioned it, and Nick and Scot probably read only about finance. Definitely only finance. Camilla couldn't be a newspaper reader. Camilla probably didn't even know Evelyn's last name. New York blogs wouldn't care about a Maryland lawyer. It was all right. It would be fine.

“The truth,” Barbara was saying loudly, “is that every single person in Bibville knows about what your father has done. Leiberg Channing, champion of the tort cases, darling of the Democratic Party, finally brought to its knees by the Republican government it so hates. Or, let me be specific, not Leiberg, not Channing, but Dale Beegan, who never could manage to get his name on the plaque at 422 North Market.”

This stilled the room. Barbara was staring at her husband with eyes that had lost their light. Dale had stopped his fidgeting and was studying his locked-together hands. Evelyn felt the energy draining from her, and the orange-wax smell that Valeriya must have put on the wooden floors seemed like it was getting stronger.

It was her father who finally broke the silence by clearing his throat. He patted his knees. “Well, I'd best be returning to preparing for this deposition. Got any other questions?”

Evelyn shook her head no and raised her eyes toward her mother, who was now looking lost and distracted in the living room. Evelyn tiptoed backward and turned off the lights as she exited.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Social History

Upstairs, Evelyn sat cross-legged in the window seat of her childhood bedroom, looking out toward the creek and the bay grass, watching the neighbors' affenpinscher tussle with a branch just outside of a clump of trees.

Peg Oney's case. That was when her father's career was starting to take off. He came home on weekends sometimes, but just as often he stayed in Beaumont, Texas, or Caddo, Arkansas, or Tallahassee, Florida, places Evelyn looked up in the giant atlas in the piano room. She still thought her father was glamorous then, that his double-breasted suits were fancy and his styled hair made him look like Howard Keel, not that the suits were tacky and the hair was overdone. Sometimes she wished she could still see him like that, like when she was a little girl and she'd slip into his study and pat his smooth leather briefcase as he'd pass her a butterscotch with a wink. She would stay there for a long time sometimes, quietly braiding the fringe of his rug as she listened to him scribble on his yellow pad.

Her parents had met in her mother's sophomore fall at Hollins, a small, horsey college in Virginia. Barbara Topfer had been born in Baltimore but her family left Peabody Heights for the suburbs in the 1950s. Her father ran off with a young secretary at his shipping company when Barbara was a teenager. He sent enough money that Barbara and her mother were comfortable, but Barbara saw his absence as a shame and a judgment. Stranded with her mother in Towson, Barbara watched movies, and Barbara read books, and Barbara was pretty, and Barbara decided her destiny was greater than to stay where she was. She applied to Hollins College, and by the time she got there, she had her story all worked out: she was from old shipping money, and her father hadn't run off with a secretary but had died young, leaving Barbara a great fortune. (Evelyn had been startled to hear this version of events from a friend of her mother's from Hollins.)

Barbara's sophomore fall, she'd gone to a University of North Carolina homecoming and met Dale Beegan. Dale, who'd gotten a scholarship to NC State for college and had near-perfect grades there, had made it to UNC for law school, where he was a star. Barbara's date for the weekend was one of the preppy classmates Dale couldn't stand, so he took great pleasure in wooing her away. Barbara was easily wooed; she thought his ambition, charm, and blue-collar roots made for a political cocktail. She once told Evelyn that she'd believed Dale was on his way to becoming an ambassador or a senator or even president. Barbara had ambition, too, raw ambition that she as a girl wasn't allowed to admit to. In Hollins in the 1960s, that ambition was allowed to go precisely one place: wifehood. If Barbara couldn't drive the car, she wanted to sit in the passenger seat. They married after Dale's law-school graduation; Barbara never finished college.

It wasn't until Evelyn was at Sheffield that Evelyn deduced that something must have happened to explain the twelve-year gap between her parents' wedding and her birth, when Barbara was an ancient-for-Hollins-girls thirty-three. She found out what that was one afternoon on summer break from Sheffield, when Barbara, deep into a bottle of white wine, called her to the terrace to warn her that women's fertility does not last long.

Barbara had trouble getting pregnant once she and Dale decided to try, she told Evelyn, who winced and turned toward the creek. The weeks stretched to an unbelievable length as she followed her doctor's advice of carefully prescribed intercourse (“Mom!” Evelyn said, but that did not stop Barbara's speech), waited, and wondered if she felt especially tired, then felt the regular cramps and disappointment return. It took a year until Barbara was finally pregnant.

When Barbara told Dale, after a doctor's appointment, that the baby was now the size of a pea, Dale took to calling the baby Li'l Pea. As Barbara relayed this anecdote to Evelyn, Evelyn heard her mother's voice catch.

Barbara was three months pregnant and blotting white paint for a sheep's fleece onto a mural in the baby's room when she started bleeding. There were cramps and dried blood in her underwear, Barbara said—and here Evelyn again tried to make her stop, but Barbara, who had barely acknowledged the existence of bodily functions in her life, seemed insistent on giving Evelyn every detail of the miscarriage without betraying any emotion about it. She drove herself to the hospital, as Dale was trying a case in California, and was given sedatives. When she awoke, the doctor told her that she had lost the baby—that
she
had lost the baby.

The bleeding went on for more than two weeks, when Barbara would awake after a restless tossing sleep in the middle of the night to more cramps, more expulsion, waiting for her body and her baby to disintegrate. Each new cramp mocked her body's inhospitableness, her inability to do this one simple and basic thing that women all over the world could do and she could not. At Dale's urging, she went to church after the miscarriage, but left when the priest asked the congregation to pray for the people who have died, and she didn't know whether the church thought that the collection of cells inside her had been a person who had died.

Then your father, Barbara said, her face grim. Your father. He did nothing but work for weeks after. He sent his secretary to check in during the day—his
secretary,
she said. Ten weeks after the miscarriage, Dale arrived home early. “He told me that he'd looked at everything—my medical records, my medications—without my permission—and found that there was a cause for it. That a drug I was taking, pentathilinate, was problematic, and that there were other cases where women had miscarried while taking the drug. He found a doctor in Kentucky who refused to let pregnant patients near the stuff.”

Evelyn remembered reading about the case. Her father had shown her a
Washington Post
article about it. Thanks to his case and others like it, now women had to sign something promising they wouldn't get pregnant if they were taking pentathilinate. Dale had cemented his reputation with the case. He'd asked the jury and onlookers to imagine what the little pea—the phrase her father used, she remembered with a wisp of nausea—would be feeling, saying, “‘Let me live. Let me hold on,' right as she could feel that drug working against her.” The
Post
had said his speaking in the voice of the unborn baby had made some jurors sob, especially as he described the life the girl could be living now, toddling around and grabbing everything in sight and growing shocks of silken hair. Dale Beegan had to stop at that point, the paper said, to gather himself at the podium; the reporter could see his shoulders shaking.

“He wanted me to testify,” Barbara had said. “He thought I'd be just the ideal witness, up there serving up my past to perfect strangers so they could judge me. I didn't know, Evelyn. I would never have taken the drug if I'd known. It was for skin, just for clear skin, and I never would've.”

“It's okay,” said Evelyn, lifting her gaze from the creek to her mother.

“We didn't know then—”

“It's okay,” Evelyn said again.

“It wasn't his,” her mother said, anger piercing the words.

“The baby?” Evelyn said, too loudly.

“Of course the baby was his, Evelyn. What on earth gets into your mind? It just, it wasn't his to take. To exploit. I'm the one who lost the baby.”

Evelyn guessed her parents started sleeping in separate rooms starting then.

With Dale working, Evelyn's youth had been mostly her and Barbara, a table for two at the Eastern Tennis Club. As a kid, on Monday mornings, Evelyn would wait until she heard the crunch of her father's shoes on the gravel, then would slip out to the piano room and sit under the itchy navy blanket on the couch. She tried to keep her eyes open until her mother joined her minutes later, but was often dozing when she felt the cool hand stroke her hair, and then Evelyn would open her eyes, and her mother would open the piano and begin to play. Barbara started with scales, light and fluid, and then moved to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'” or “Bill.” Sometimes she'd ask Evelyn what she wanted to hear. Evelyn, who'd always been thinking about this question for several days, would tell her. If her mother and father had been angry with each other, Evelyn would ask for “Waitin' for My Dearie” or “If I Loved You,” thinking that no one could play those songs and not be in love. If her mother had been having a moody few days, Evelyn would ask for a funny song, like “Sister Suffragette.” Sometimes, when her mother had been happy for a day or two, and was making plans with friends or for Evelyn, Evelyn knew she could ask for what she really wanted: “Somewhere,” from
West Side Story
. There's a place for us, she'd sing to her stuffed animals at night.

Evelyn started to play when she was five, and her large-note Clementi and Mozart workbooks were still stacked in the built-in cupboards on the side of the Sag Neck piano room, along with Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Frank Loesser from when she improved. She was surprised by how much better her pieces sounded when they moved in—the piano room was almost like a concert hall. No one bothered her in there when she was playing, but sometimes Evelyn could crane her neck over the piano and see her mother sitting outside on the patio, listening. Those were the best times, her mother there but facing away from her and watching Meetinghouse Creek list by, a window offering a firm divide between them, Evelyn's fingers creating songs.

Evelyn used to wait up on Fridays for her father to come home from Wilmington for the weekend. That had changed after the Peg Oney case. After opening arguments, her family went out to dinner with the plaintiffs at an Italian place with plastic menus on the side of the highway, and everyone in town had come up to her father to thank him for the work he was doing. “Your father's such a special man…” “He's been real good to us…” “You're so lucky…” Her father was so busy taking in adulation that he barely spoke to her and her mother, even after their long trip.

Barbara hauled Dale away from the adoring crowd, and Evelyn wanted to hide under the table when she saw her mother pull from her purse a handmade pink-paper valentine that Evelyn had brought home from school the week before which said “Dad” in her scrapey handwriting on the front, and shove it at Dale's chest. It felt like that was her own pink heart beating on that rough paper as her father stared at it and then his mouth turned into a line and neither he nor her mother said anything to her about it and she couldn't sleep well that night, imagining the valentine on top of a pile of old linguine in the restaurant's Dumpster. Barbara and Evelyn left Cresheim three days ahead of schedule.