Shining Through (20 page)

I couldn’t help asking, “Vincenzo?”

“That’s Vincent in Italian.”

“I see,” I said.

“You do? Well, Miss Voss, tell me what you see.” It was always questions with Mr. Leland, but working with him three or four hours a week, I’d learned that whether or not he liked my answers, he never held them against me personally. I was convinced the questions were completely impersonal, asked to get information or a reaction, not to test me—Linda Voss—in any way.

“My guess is the letters are some sort of code to someone in Germany.” No reaction. “And maybe someone will be mailing this letter from Italy…” Annoyance. “Because of the Vincenzo business.”

I typed the letters at an old Royal he kept in a closet in his office. I never typed envelopes for them. I never made carbons.

When I gave Mr. Leland the typed letter, I had to give him the steno pad I’d used. Each time I went to his office, I needed a brand-new pad. I never knew who mailed the letters or where they went.

“Any other deductions, Miss Voss?”

“I hope I’m not…I don’t want to overstep my bounds.”

“Go on.”

“If this has anything to do with harbors or ships or aircraft carriers or E-boats or U-boats…” My stomach did a flop, but I clutched my pencil tight, as if grabbing on to a subway pole, and I got through that bump. “What I’m saying is, the Germans aren’t dopes. If this is a code, I hope it’s about something…” I paused. “Something not watery.” No reaction.

But I was starting to be able to read him a little. My father had always said I was really smart about people, and that if I 144 / SUSAN ISAACS

didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve about everything, I’d have made a good poker player because I could see past the faces people put on. And I think he’d been right. I bet most people wouldn’t have noticed Mr. Leland getting annoyed about a comment that the letter was going to be mailed from Italy. The change in his face was so small it wasn’t really a change at all.

And I also knew that whatever the code was, it was okay; it had nothing to do with anything watery.

What I was curious to ask him, and naturally I couldn’t, was how come he used me as a measure of how good his secrets were. I guessed I was his Miss Everybody, his Jane Doe, his Average American.

What I was also dying to ask him was what I should do about my whole life. He was so smart. He advised senators, judges.

Everyone said he even got calls from the White House. I need some advice, I could say—just like FDR would. See, I’m two months down, seven months to go, and how can I possibly tell John Berringer that I’m going to have his baby?

I told him by just telling him. I went straight from Edward Leland’s leathery, lawyery office into John’s immaculate modern one and said, “I have to talk to you.”

He smiled and said, “Later,” but did not look up from the letter of agreement he was marking with a red pencil. I didn’t move.

My reflection in his shiny desk must have annoyed him, because when he glanced up, he took a fast, deep breath and then quickly forced his face into its I’m-not-only-handsome-I’m-a-nice-guy expression: His head tilted a little to the right; the corners of his mouth turned up just enough to show that despite the chilly blond superiority of his looks, he was truly good-natured. But I knew him well enough to know that at this moment he wasn’t—at least not toward me. Still, I was under the influence of Edward Leland’s world, where men with damaged faces made terrible, secret decisions, a world where a fringe of thick lashes over sapphire eyes didn’t count for a damn. It gave me courage.

SHINING THROUGH / 145

So I spoke. “I have to talk to you
now
.” Whatever was in my voice made him put down his pencil.

“This can’t wait for tonight?”

“No.”

“Linda, I’m really under enormous pressure.”

“So am I.”

He cut me off. “I’m sure you are.” He glanced down at the letter he was editing. “I hate to be rude, but the longer you stand here, the longer it will take me to get this back to you to be retyped. Are you in the mood to be stuck here until ten, eleven o’clock? Because I’m not. I’d like to get home and…” He gave me a little smile. It meant goodbye.

I sat myself down in the small, ugly modern chair by the side of his desk; it looked like a tilted soup plate.

“Please, have a seat,” he said, really irritated now. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“
What?
” But he’d heard me, because it was as if he switched gears. Now you could almost hear his mind whirring, as if he was starting up the most intricate argument against the toughest opponent of his career. “Are you sure?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“I’ve missed two—”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he interrupted. He was talking fast. “There could be any number of reasons for a skipped period.”

“Two periods,” I managed to say. To this day I can’t figure out how I was able to keep such control. I sounded so composed I could almost have been a match for him. “I missed two periods—please let me finish—so I had a rabbit test. It came out positive.” John’s fair skin went from pale to white. “And I went to the doctor to double-check. And I am.”

“Didn’t you use anything?” he finally asked.

“Use anything?”

“Use anything! A diaphragm.” I shook my head. “Jesus Christ!”

146 / SUSAN ISAACS

“I wouldn’t know where to get one.”

“From the same damned doctor who confirmed your pregnancy!”

“But he’s been our family doctor for years.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t go to him. I didn’t want him to think I was…” My hands were in my lap, clasped so tight my fingers began to throb.

His hand turned into a fist, and he crashed it down on the desk. “You did this purposely, didn’t you?
Didn’t you
, damn it!”

He banged again, harder. “The minute Nan left, you started planning—”

Then came one of those moments that kill drama. John’s eyes turned dark with anger, I tried to shrivel up to invisibility in that disgusting chair…and the phone rang. Softly at his desk, but through the closed door I could hear it shrilling at mine. Automatically, I reached over, picked up the receiver and very calmly said, “Mr. Berringer’s office.”

“Mr. Waring calling for Mr. Berringer,” a secretary at some other, more chaste law firm said. She sounded so efficient, so calm. No two missed periods for her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Berringer is out of the office at the moment.”

John’s eyes moved back and forth, as if he couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or grab the phone from me. “May I have him return Mr. Waring’s call tomorrow morning?” She said I could, and I hung up with a courteous “Thank you.”

And then I turned to John. My voice was still secretary sweet.

“Let me just tell you one thing. I didn’t lay any traps for you. If you happen to remember that first night, it was you, not me, who insisted on being friendly. I’m not a sneak, and I would
never
—”

“Fine. Wonderful. You’re far beyond opportunistic intrigues.

But somehow it never occurred to you in all these weeks that you might take precautions.”

“I guess not,” I answered. “You’re the smart one. Did it ever occur to you?”

There was silence that went on too long to be a moment of SHINING THROUGH / 147

silence. At last he said, “Please go now. I have work to finish.

We can continue this discussion later.”

And then he picked up his red pencil, changed a colon to a semicolon. I returned to my desk.

When you’re writing things down, no matter how detailed you try to be you always wind up leaving things out. So let me put in what I’ve left out. (You know what Dr. Freud says, that you don’t leave anything out by mistake? It had always sounded like a lot of Viennese
Schlag
to me, but who was I to say? I was the girl who left out a diaphragm.) Anyway, the details.

After our first time together, I’d stopped saying Mr. Berringer, but I have never called him John.

He never asked me anything about my family, or even if I had a family. Once I mentioned something about going home to Queens, and he said, “Oh, I thought you lived in Brooklyn.”

He’d grown up on Long Island, in Port Washington. He told me his father had been in business out there. I asked what kind of business, and he’d said, “Financial.” He didn’t like to talk about his parents. They’d died in a car crash in 1929, when he was in his second year of law school, and I couldn’t tell whether or not it still hurt him to even think about them or whether maybe there was something about them he didn’t want to talk about.

I’d asked him, “What church did your parents go to?”

“What?” he’d asked.

“What church did your parents go to?”

“Episcopal.” He was staring at me like I was nuts, because we had just finished—we were still breathing hard, still sweating, actually—and most people wouldn’t dream of discussing church before they took a shower.

“Both of them?” I inquired.

“Yes.”

Another thing: He had been an only child.

Another: John was in demand. Two weeks after Nan left, the phone started ringing. It was this or that partner’s wife, 148 / SUSAN ISAACS

wanting him to meet this or that girl. How did I know? How do you think? Once, after John picked up in his office, I clicked the button fast, covered the mouthpiece, then eaves-dropped.

“John, my dear, I have an absolute dream of a girl you must meet. Laura Steele. Of the Steeles.” John said he’d love to. Not yet, but very soon. “You’re not being naughty and seeing anyone else, are you, John?” the voice demanded. “No,” he’d told her.

“No one.”

He called me back into his office about seven o’clock that same night. It wasn’t dark yet, but the moon was out, full, risen so it was almost as high as John’s head, and it had the soft, slightly yellowish shine of a giant ball of taffy. His office lamp wasn’t on, so the room was illuminated by moonlight; it made the hard furniture—and John—seem more gentle.

His posture, though, was so straight, businesslike, that for a second I thought he was going to give me the letter of agreement to retype. But when I glanced down at his desk, I saw he hadn’t gotten any farther than the semicolon he’d been working on three hours before.

“Sit down,” he said. With the moonlight pouring through the open window, his hair glowed, as if he had a halo. “Let me be blunt, Linda. Are you willing to get rid of it?”

“The baby?” I whispered.

“Yes. I’ve learned of someone, a reputable physician. It can be done in a hospital in Puerto Rico. Very clean. And all on the up-and-up.”

Here was this shining man, and all I wanted to do was make him happy. But as I started to nod, to think the words “Whatever you want,” I thought about my being pregnant in a way I hadn’t before. Maybe not in a goo-gooish maternal-instinct way, imagining something soft and pink and smelling of Johnson’s Baby Powder. But for the first time I comprehended that my awful afternoon sickness and the tight waistbands of my skirts were due to something more than a medical condition that was lousing up my life.

I can’t say I wanted a baby. I didn’t picture myself buying SHINING THROUGH / 149

tiny, fluffy sweaters. It was only later that I thought it would have fair hair, like me and John, and wondered whether it would have his deep blue eyes or my brown.

“Please listen to me carefully,” he said. “This is probably the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life. I hope you’ll make it…” His voice faded away, as if it wasn’t worth the energy to go on.

“What?” I asked. “Finish what you were going to say.”

“I hope your decision will be rational.”

“Do I look like a raving lunatic?”

“Linda, must you be so argumentative?”

“If I’m capable of being argumentative,” I said, “then I’m obviously capable of being rational, so you can relax.” He never expected that from me; he stared, almost as if he was waiting for the ventriloquist who’d said that line to pop up behind my chair. “And being so rational, I’d appreciate it if you were a little clearer.” I pulled my chair closer to his desk. “What do
you
want me to do?”

“You know what I want.”

“Tell me.”

“I would like you to get rid of it. I want you not to use the fact of your getting pregnant as leverage.”

“Leverage?” I asked, but I knew exactly what he meant.

“To get me to”—he could hardly bring himself to spit out the words—“marry you.”

“I don’t expect you to do that.”

“What am I supposed to do if you decide not to get rid of it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not anything I’ve thought about.” I paused then, and I thought. It didn’t take much time. “You could give me some money so I could have it,” I said.

“So you don’t want to…you won’t consider even speaking with that doctor?”

“No. Please, now I’d like you to listen to me. No matter what you think, I’m not some cheap floozy trying to trap you.”

“I never meant to imply that, Linda.”

“And I’m not some dope who can’t understand the pickle 150 / SUSAN ISAACS

she’s in…and you’re in. So just hear me out.” I hated this, thinking on my feet or, more accurately, on my behind. But since I hadn’t prepared myself, I had no choice. “I guess I’ll have to get out of here pretty soon, before I start getting noticeable, or it’ll be bad for you. I’ll need some money to live. No more than I’m getting now, twenty-five dollars a week. Well, money for a doctor too.

“I can’t go away anywhere, because I have to take care of my mother. But since no one you know would ever put even his little toe in Ridgewood, there’s nothing to worry about.” For him. For me, oh, God, it was going to be something going to the grocery with a belly the size of a watermelon. “And I’m not going to do anything to embarrass you after I have it. You don’t have to concern yourself. I’m not going to come in with some little bundle in a blanket and stand weeping by the elevator bank.”

John went absolutely green around the gills. “You’d
keep
it?”

“I don’t know.” I wanted to cry. “It’s a baby.”

He leaned toward me and rested his arms on his desk. “I could arrange for someone to take care of your mother, so you could get away. And then, later, for a nice, quiet adoption.”