Somebody Else's Daughter (4 page)

Claire walked him to the door and he turned to her and took her arm and kissed her forehead. “I know it's hard to see it, my dear, but this is your father's apology. Maybe he couldn't do it when he was alive, but he's doing it now.”

3

Nate Gallagher woke in his Brooklyn apartment, his bedsheets soaked with sweat. She had come to him again in a dream, cradling a swaddled infant in her arms. He went to work that morning in a fog, riding the subway with the detached preoccupation of a condemned man. He spilled coffee on his trousers in the teachers' lounge, and during his first-period class, entirely forgot the content of his lecture, staring out at the sea of faces with a bewildered gaze of apology. As he was leaving work, there was a freak electrical storm and it began to hail. He pulled up his coat, an old lumber jacket he'd bought used, and ducked into the public library for shelter and wasted an hour in the lounge near the magazine racks. A copy of
Academic Monthly
caught his eye. When he was a boy, his mother had had a habit of perusing the job listings in the back of the magazine and he would sit with her in the living room of their borrowed house, entertaining the possibility of moving to some other place, someplace far away like Montana, where there was open space and less of what his mother called the burden of judgment, even though they both knew that his father would never leave Choate.
Splendor in the Berkshires
read the headline of one of the current job listings. The Pioneer School, which billed itself as a prestigious college preparatory school, advertised the need for a writing instructor. It was only for one year, filling in for a teacher on sabbatical.

On an impulse, he sent a letter to the Head, with a copy of his résumé and references, and two weeks later, the Head's wife, Maggie Heath, called him. “Nate Gallagher?” Her voice came as an accusation. She identified herself, explaining how she'd gone to Choate and how Nate's father had been her favorite teacher.

Nate's father had been something of a legend in those days, hamming up his professorial image with a wool vest and tartan beret. With his lilting Irish brogue, he could transform even the most pedestrian prose. He was famous for his recitation of
Beowulf
, a highlight of the spring semester of sophomore year. But when it came to his own family, he had little patience for the routines of domesticity, or for the unexceptional qualities of his only son.

For a variety of reasons, Nate had never graduated from Choate. He'd gone to San Francisco and met Catherine; two years later she was dead. At a loss, having nowhere else to go, he drove back to Wallingford and appeared on his parents' doorstep. Nate stayed there for several weeks, holed up in his mother's sewing room, drinking as much whiskey and swallowing as many pills as his body would tolerate, until his mother shoved something under the door. An application to Yale. “Your father has made a phone call to the dean of admissions, ” she whispered. “They're willing to take you if you get your GED.”

The next morning, Nate left the house and drove to New Haven, but not to attend Yale. Instead, he passed his high school equivalency and enrolled in the community college. He fumbled through that first semester, until an English professor praised one of his short stories.

He kept his writing to himself, but put all his spare time into his work—that's what he'd begun to call it—his
work.
In his mind, writing was a way of reaching Cat, a way of finding her again and again inside that made-up world. He didn't know where it would take him, or whether he would make his living at it, but, like some essential nutrient, it seemed to keep him alive. To support himself he earned his teaching certification and secured a job in a sprawling public high school in Brooklyn, teaching suspicious, intolerant students how to make sentences. Everything about his life there, where he lived, his neighborhood, the constant alarming insinuation of strangers—once he'd been mugged at gunpoint—had turned him into someone else, someone he barely recognized. On the streets, he had learned to be invisible. It was a kind of exile, a place he'd banished himself to. There were the tenements, bristling with barbed wire. Windows were barred up to the rooftops—it occurred to him that he too was a prisoner. His gloomy apartment, the dim corridors of the high school where he taught, the numb and indifferent students, his taciturn colleagues, a routine of futility, of compromise. Over time, it had worn him down.

On the day of his interview at Pioneer, the Head, Jack Heath, gave him a tour of the 350-acre campus, loaning him a pair of thigh-high muck boots for the expedition. It was early March: the beginning of mud season in the Berkshires, although, Heath reminded him, it was not uncommon to see snow into May. On the tour, Heath explained that the school had once been the summer home of Eliot Chase, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur. The property abutted the state forest and had been a working farm for a century before it had been turned into a school. Heath had been Head for nearly seven years and implied, in a voice teeming with pride, that when he'd arrived on the scene the school had nearly fallen to ruin. “I had to chase a cow out of one of the classrooms!” he told him, his eyes bright with the memory. “I saw this place as an opportunity,” Heath said wistfully. “To start something new, you know, to make changes, to fix it.”

“Is it fixed?”

“I like to think so. When we first came, the kids would come to class barefoot. We'd catch the teachers getting stoned in the woods. Now, they're a whole different species of animal.”

“How'd you turn it around?” Nate asked.

“In a word?” Heath grinned with pride. “Uniforms.”

Heath himself was the image of a prep school headmaster, what Nate's mother would have called a usual suspect. Khaki trousers, a cable-knit cardigan (unlike a crew neck, the cardigan made a more progressive, even
evolved
impression), a red bow tie (which Nate interpreted as a coy, Republican gesture), and bookish, wire-rim glasses. Less typical was the loosely knitted persimmon scarf that his wife might have made him for Christmas. The ruddy flush in his cheeks was either good health or alcohol, Nate couldn't decide which. Nevertheless, he suspected that Heath's overall package dazzled the mothers.

“I met your father, once,” Heath told him. “What a great character.”

“He certainly was,” Nate said. “He's not doing so well now. He can recite
The Duino Elegies
by heart, but ask him what day of the week it is . . .”

On the first of August, Nate caught an express train from Penn Station to Hudson, New York. He carried a single suitcase. The excursion was two hours long, a picturesque journey along the river, and when he arrived at the station he hired a cab and instructed the driver to take him to the nearest used-car dealership. The driver knew of one in Canaan, some twenty miles away. In just a few minutes they were in the country, fields of corn and alfalfa, desolate old farms. Nate cracked the window, smelling the earth. His eyes burned in the white glare. It was good to be out, he thought. He was like a man who'd been granted asylum, and for the first time in years he felt free.

4

The time had come to make peace with the house.

It had been two weeks since her father's funeral and still Claire walked around like a disoriented housekeeper as though at any moment the owners would come home and send her away. It was a dark place, shrill with mothballs. Dense mustard carpeting. A hovering gloom.

That morning she tugged down the heavy drapes. Many of the windows refused to open. She had to use soap, coaxing the splintered wood to relent. The house had been holding its breath for a century. Now the wind rushed through the screens and sang to her, a sad wheezing song. She pulled out the carpeting, cutting it up with an X-Acto knife. Sweating into the filthy wool. She hauled the stinking rug out to the yard, dragging it like a corpse. Then sunlight came and went across the wood floors. She scrubbed the wide boards on her hands and knees. There were mice. Lumpy brown spiders unraveled from their webs like spools of thread. She cut oranges into a pail of vinegar and washed the floors. She was a slave to the house. She wanted it to like her. She did everything herself, her body running with sweat, sweat dripping down her arms, her wrists. It was a quiet time. Aside from Teddy, whole days passed and she spoke to no one.

Sometimes she'd pause at the windows. Her father had given her this gift, an ache in her belly when she thought of it. Guilt like a water snake in her bowels. She emptied his closets, the jackets, ties, the bulky overcoats, his
costumes,
he would say, her hands lovingly smoothing the soft cashmere. Sometimes she sensed him standing in the doorway, smoking one of his cigars. She gathered the clothes in her arms, the unruly pile like a screaming child. She would take everything to Goodwill. Her mother's things she would bring to the women's shelter. Even after all these years, her father had never bothered to clean out her mother's things. Her mother had been exotic; she'd had excellent taste, a dancer's posture. She wore heavy beads and rings, dangling carnelian earrings. There were rows of cashmere sweaters entombed in plastic bags, mothballs spilled out like lost teeth. Her shoes in boxes, old Ferragamo pumps wrapped in tissue paper, never worn. Claire missed her terribly; she'd never stopped missing her.

She wanted to get into the barn, to make herself a place to work. She wanted to get her hands on her women. Her hands thick with plaster, the wet, warm feeling like birth. Nobody knew her. She was all alone. Maybe her father knew. Maybe he was watching her now, following her around, his ghost shuffling down the hall. She could smell his dead man's breath. He had not gone up to heaven. He had stayed down in the house so he could watch her.

The house was a blessing, it was a curse. There was the luxury of walking barefoot through the rooms, across the pale wood floors. The bathroom with its porcelain basin, apricot soap. Sunlight streaming in on her naked skin. And through every window the open fields, the pear and apple trees, the final days of summer. The trees were heavy with their sloppy green leaves. Somehow, she knew this place had saved her life and she wanted to show it her appreciation. In her old jeans and one of her father's work shirts, she pulled down wallpaper, the torn pieces like a puzzle on the floor. Peacock feathers here and there. Monkeys and palm trees and little men in turbans. She sanded and scraped and the whole house began to sing. She let the radio play. Teddy convinced her to paint everything white. In the evenings, they painted together, after supper, as the sky turned from blue to black. He said little to her, but she could see a change in him. No longer the frowning boy. He smiled more, he whistled to the music. When their arms grew tired, they went to bed.

She had first seen the girl on Route 7, walking along the side of the road carrying a plastic bag. She'd been hitchhiking, walking backward with her thumb stuck out. She was a tall girl, maybe twenty, with stringy brown hair. She had a strong face, prominent bones. She saw her once outside Wal-Mart, crossing the intersection, running for the bus. Then she saw her again at Sunrise House.

Sunrise House was a women's shelter in Pittsfield that took donations on Sundays. The shelter was located in a modest neighborhood at the end of a cul-de-sac, set back behind a high hedge of bushes. That morning, as Claire pulled up in front of the small house, the same girl was coming out. Up close she was pale and slim, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had on a pink sweater, two sizes too big for her, and walked with her head down. Claire cut the engine and got out and opened the trunk. The girl glanced over her shoulder, warily, and that's when Claire saw the black eye.

Claire turned away, pretending not to notice—not wanting to intrude on the girl's privacy. Yet there was nothing private about a bruise like that, and regardless of what the circumstances had been, witnessing it made Claire want to do something—anything—to help her. When she turned back around, she saw that the girl had crossed the street and was walking briskly up the sidewalk. Claire took the box of her mother's clothes out of the trunk. Her mother's raincoat was on top, an old Burberry with the classic plaid lining—just about the girl's size, she thought, setting it aside. She carried the box onto the porch and placed it on a table under a sign that said
Donations.
She could hear the sound of children playing in the backyard. Back in her car, she pulled down the street and caught up with the girl. She put her window down and asked if she wanted a ride. The girl hesitated, squinting around to see if anyone was watching, her eye a garish purple in the sunlight. When she got into the car, Claire could smell the alcohol they'd used to clean the wound and something else, a kind of musky cologne. Her nose was running; it was red and raw.

“Where can I take you?”

The girl looked straight ahead through the windshield. “I live far from here.” She spoke with an accent, either Russian or Polish. “Can you just take me to Lenox? They have a bus.”

“All right.”

The girl's white pumps were scuffed and dirty. She had high arches, bunions. Round muscles in her calves. A dancer, Claire suspected. She sat with her ankles crossed, her knees turned out, and her hands clenched in her lap like a first grader on picture day. Her purse was small, a child's purse.

“Do you need a coat?” Claire asked, showing her the coat.

The girl looked at it. “You don't want it?”

“It's too small. It was my mother's coat.”

The girl examined it. “It's nice. You sure?”

“Of course. What's your name?”

“Petra,” she glanced at Claire uncertainly. “Here, they call me Pearl.”

“Where are you from?”

“I am from Poland.”