My Latest Grievance (31 page)

She called one night to report proudly that she'd finally told her mother she was pregnant. Bibi had cried tears of guarded joy, which she didn't revoke upon hearing that the boyfriend had failed to leave a forwarding address. Bibi had asked—and Laura Lee repeated gamely to my mother as they passed each other on Longfellow Lane—if David would consider claiming paternity so that the baby could have a name. My mother led Laura Lee to the nearest bench, where she lectured professionally on the dangers of rumors and gossip in a closed culture.

Still, who was a better sport than my mother? On August 7, Laura Lee gave birth to a long, strawberry blond baby girl, blood type O, at the Boston Hospital for Women, Aviva Hatch in attendance. The new mother named her baby Juliet, and named me, aged seventeen and a half, her guardian.

Not long afterward, Laura Lee dressed Juliet in a sunbonnet and sun suit and arranged her in a nest of blankets in a clothes basket, which she placed on our front porch along with a small, Orphan Annie suitcase. The doorbell rang and our housekeeper answered; her scream brought the entire family to the porch. We might have called 9-1-1 if we hadn't understood immediately that it was Juliet, and if Laura Lee hadn't been sitting a few yards away on the porch glider, dabbing her eyes with a cloth diaper.

My father asked calmly, "And what is this supposed to be a metaphor for, Laura Lee?"

"For nothing! It's me saying I have no choice but to face facts. How can I take care of a baby when I have no home? There's a note to that effect in her diaper bag."

David said, "My understanding is that no one is asking you to leave until you're back on your feet."

"I want to stay," she said. "I feel that the new regime and I will be a much better fit than the previous son of a bitch's."

My father carried the basket to the glider and set it at Laura Lee's feet. "So you were leaving Juliet on our stoop so we can raise her as our own? Even though we did such a questionable job with Frederica?"

"It breaks my heart, but I think it's for the best," she said. "Can I hold her?" I asked Laura Lee.

"You should address those questions to me from now on," said my mother. "And the answer is no. Never wake a sleeping baby."

"I haven't heard anything about my replacement," said Laura Lee. "I think that means that you're keeping the door open."

My father sat down next to her on the glider. "Laura Lee. You were a disaster. The trustees went beyond the call of duty to give you this extension."

"I was only a disaster in terms of my private life," Laura Lee countered. "Can't you separate the personal from the professional,
especially now that I'm a mother, and my maternal instincts are at an all-time high?"

I volunteered that the housing office had had someone lined up, an obviously ambivalent applicant, who had just gotten into medical school from the waiting list. Poof: withdrawal. Poof: a vacancy.

"Go inside, Frederica," my father answered.

"Can I show the baby to Grace?"

My mother said, "Laura Lee wasn't serious about leaving the baby on our doorstep, so don't start petitioning for another bedroom to be painted pink."

Laura Lee crouched down and enfolded the laundry basket in a theatrically protective embrace, endangered-mother-lioness-style. Above her head, my parents rolled their eyes.

At the appointed time, the two oldest Woodbury daughters came back for their mother. I wanted to slip away first—no good-byes, no scene—but I was overruled. Grace would be confused, my parents said; she had to hear the facts and see for herself that the team was breaking up.

"Gracie," I told her at breakfast. "I'm going off to college today, a different one. It's in another state, but not ridiculously far away. You'll be going to live with actual relatives. I'll call you at your new house."

To my relief, she didn't understand; her eyes were on the present I was holding, wrapped in purple paper, a parting gift of picture books, sequels to her favorites. "Freddy go," she said eagerly.

Her daughters came for her that afternoon. Marietta, they reported, was headed for her own freshman orientation at a previously all-male college, proud to serve the cause of coeducation. They had brought Grace a snapshot of Marietta in a cap and gown, standing between her sisters—scowling, they insisted, only because the sun was in her eyes. My parents swore that Grace pointed to the graduate and said, "Baby." They also swore that she left willingly with her first- and second-born daughters, and that her tears were tears of joy.

A
SCALED-BACK LAURA LEE
stayed in Tibbets Hall until Juliet started kindergarten, a juncture that coincided with her inheriting Bibi's fully-paid-for Schenectady house. I was away at college for four of Juliet's five years on campus, but I heard longdistance about the splash she was making, mascot-wise. Laura Lee wrote and sent me photos. Juliet was a beautiful child and looked so much like her mother that it was easy to forget the genetic contribution of Eric Woodbury. According to Laura Lee, Juliet loved to look through yearbooks past and could always pick out Cousin Frederica, no matter how unflattering or how crowded the photographs. The baby's undisputed favorite layout: the candlelight vigil, which she had attended in utero. Even at five, Laura Lee insisted, Juliet grasped its significance and grasped that her mother had contributed to the pageantry and, in some small way, to the advancement of Cousin David.

Ten years ago, Laura Lee asked my father if she might enroll Juliet a year early at Dewing. For better or for worse, she claimed, the child felt a profound attachment to the school and had always seen herself returning, despite her high grades and fabulous PSATs.

"Why now?" my father said. "Why not let her apply when she's a senior?"

"She's ready," said Laura Lee. "And if she isn't, she's got you and Aviva there for backup."

"Put Juliet on the phone," my father said.

"Why the rush?" he asked her. "Don't you want to graduate with your class?"

Juliet said—our first inkling that she was the most sensible child ever born—"Yes, I do, but I also need to go away, and I can't have both."

He and my mother translated her answer to mean, "I need my freedom, and I need to get out of Schenectady, but my mother is listening to every word, so I'm hoping you can read between the lines." The need, it turned out, was that Laura Lee was sick. And like a doomed parent in another century, she was putting her dearly loved child on a train.

My father recused himself from the vote that brought me back to Dewing after a series of jobs at more prestigious schools too far from home. I am here now, vice chancellor for administration, in charge of all things financial. My family and I live on a side street and in a house that I suspect is based on the Patsy Leonard model of single-family, two-car, conventional happiness. On those rare days when I feel a fleeting nostalgia for communal living and dining, I eat my lunch at Curran Hall.

My father and mother are retired and living nearby, which is to say in an apartment so close to Dewing that it may as well be a dorm. They are both in good health; they audit classes and rally on the Boston Common against wars and oppression, weather permitting. For fun they vet every contract I sign, boilerplate or not, then return it with the offending clauses circled for my reflection and repentance.

Juliet lives and teaches in New York and visits every summer. I'm not quite old enough to be her mother but will on occasion refer to her, in shorthand conversation with strangers, as my sister. My grandmother adored her and, in her time-warped view of the David Hatch marriage continuum, saw Laura Lee's child as something more than a cousin twice removed. Juliet and I have noted
that there is a certain symmetry to our lives: that she returned to Dewing at sixteen, the same age I was when her mother's existence came to light.

With something like influence at my disposal, and as a gift to Juliet, I created a Laura Lee French Prize to be awarded to the senior who most embodied the qualities of the late housemother, euphemistically synopsized as individualistic, distinctive, artistic, and passionate. The award itself is now eagerly awaited. When the winner is announced—always a famously kooky but popular pain in the ass—the crowd goes wild.

Juliet has never met her father or her Woodbury half sisters. Laura Lee raised her not quite with the photograph of a uniformed serviceman on the mantel, but with the academic fairy-tale version of the courtship: that despite his better instincts and fine character, he'd been married and in the spotlight when their fabled love combusted. To run away with Laura Lee, or even to acknowledge paternity, would have ruined his brilliant career and broken the hearts of his sacred children.

Juliet is twenty-seven. I should be able to tell her the truth about the commotion her parents caused on campus, but I am not the social science team of David and Aviva Hatch, who live their lives under oath. I let Juliet interpret what I mean when I say that Dewing was never the same after Laura Lee arrived. And I always confirm, in good conscience, what her mother raised her to believe: that every character in her story, at one time or another, loved each other deeply.

To Mameve Medwed and Stacy Schiff, ideal readers and perfect friends, always on call and always right.

To Bob Austin, who shared my bunker during the blizzard of '78.

To everyone at the William Morris Agency, especially the divine and witty Suzanne Gluck, and geniuses Alicia Gordon, Eugenie Furniss, and Erin Malone. Also to Charlotte Mendelson at Headline Review for her good humor and enthusiasm.

To Brian McLendon for ongoing good deeds.

To the good people at Houghton Mifflin, especially Janet Silver, Lori Glazer, Megan Wilson, Libby Edelson, and Jayne Yaffe Kemp.

And a paragraph unto herself for Jane Rosenman, dear editor: nothing but shining hours.