The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (5 page)

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IT WAS, HOWEVER
, not Caroline but her father, Tom Rayley, who first talked to Kate at any length about that amazing scene on the lawn almost thirty years earlier. Caroline and Kate had become friendly, as happens now and then with full professors and much younger assistant professors. As Kate would often say, the friendship is not one of equals, nor can it pretend to be when one friend has such power, direct or indirect, over the destiny of another. All the same, they suited one another. Kate was reaching that difficult point in some lives when, growing older, one finds one’s ideas and hopes more in accord with those of the young than with those of one’s own contemporaries. Kate’s peers seemed to grow more conservative and fearful as she grew more radical and daring. Not that Kate was then or ever of the stuff from which revolutionaries are made. Perhaps because of her fortunate life, her indifference–either because she had them or did not desire them–to many of the goods of life, she seemed not to barricade herself against disturbing ideas or changing ways. The same could not, surely, be said of Tom Rayley. He came to Kate in fear, though he could scarcely tell her of what. Fear came, he suggested, with his time of life.

“I have turned sixty,” he said. “It humbles a man. For one thing,” he added darkly, “the body starts falling apart. I’ve never had very much wrong with me, and all of a sudden I find I have to make a huge effort to hold on to my teeth; I’ve got a strange disease of which they know the name but not a cure; I’ve also acquired what they call degenerative arthritis, which turns out to be another term for old age; and when I got the laboratory report from my doctor, not only was my cholesterol up, but the lab had noted, ‘serum appears cloudy,’ which didn’t bother the doctor but sounded ominous to me. On top of all that, I’d
rather Caroline didn’t go off to live with her newfound mother or father in a community somewhere full of strange rites and a profound mistrust of life’s conventions.”

Kate and Tom Rayley had met when Caroline invited Kate home for dinner. Geraldine, like Tom, lived a life in which the strict control of emotion and the avoidance of untidiness, literal or psychological, were paramount. Highly intelligent, they were good conversationalists, Geraldine in particular offering amusing and revealing accounts of the international world of fashion and the Manhattan world of real estate with which fashion, like everything else, was so intimately connected. Tom seemed rather the sort who takes in information while giving out as little as possible; he was pleasant, but after the dinner Kate realized she knew little or nothing about him.

Only when she had been, to her astonishment, summoned to lunch for a private interview did Kate discover that Tom Rayley was an impressive man, just the sort one would think of as a senior partner in a corporate law firm. Kate wondered if his democratic convictions came from an open mind or from his Southern boyhood at a time when all Southerners were Democrats. Since Rayley had not turned Republican like so many of his sort, and had settled in New York, she gave him the benefit of the doubt: his was an open mind, fearful perhaps of aging and of loneliness, but not of those chimeras requiring for their alleviation belief in nuclear weapons, separation of the races, and the strict domestication of women.

Kate was so astonished at his sudden frankness, helplessness, and revelations that she hardly knew what to say.

“What is the disease with a name but no cure?” she asked without really thinking.

“It’s a rather personal male disease, apparently of no
great significance but calculated to detonate every hideous male fear ever recorded. It’s called Peyronie’s disease, but whether he had it, identified it, or dismissed it is unclear. The only problem once it is diagnosed is–at least in my case–that my liver responded in a regrettable way to the drug supposed to alleviate it. I can’t imagine why we’re discussing this.”

“Because it has made you fearful of Caroline’s defection. I have to say,” Kate went on, “that children seem to me notably unsatisfactory when it comes to the question of their parents. Between those who fantasize other parents and those who seek biological parents, it seems that no one is satisfied. Perhaps we ought to follow Plato’s suggestion and have a world where biological parentage is neither known nor significant.”

“I’m perfectly aware that my anxiety is irrational and illogical. As a lawyer, if not as a practical realist, how could I not be aware? I think that’s why I wanted to talk with you. You, I surmise, deal in stories like this. Caroline admires you and will probably speak to you about her ‘original appearance’ more intently than she has spoken to anyone else. Also–and I hope you will not desert me totally at this honesty–I did infer that, as a sister of the famous Fansler lawyers, you would hardly be, shall we say, a disruptive person.”

“Not disruptive, but not soothing either. I’m very unlike my brothers in every possible way; perhaps you’ve heard that. And if you’re expressing some naive belief in genes, let me point out the inefficacy of that attitude from an adoptive and loving parent.”

“Oh, dear, yes,” Tom Rayley said, in no way offended. “But that’s part of my fear, you see. How can I say it? That Caroline, discovering something, one hardly knows what,
will fall out of our world and into some other world, to me unspeakable. And you, at least so far, while in another world, are not unspeakable. I understand your language; I can even learn it.”

Kate stared at him. “That is a remarkably intelligent thing to say,” she said. “I’m happy to talk with you, though Caroline is my friend, and I shall certainly talk to her also. But I am bewildered: What can you possibly think I can do for you? Isn’t this all between you and your wife and Caroline? Isn’t it all about the life you three have had together for all but a year and a half of Caroline’s existence?”

“You’ve heard the story then, the appearance from the bushes of the laughing child?”

“Yes. I’ve heard it from Caroline. As she’s heard it, and as it has been disputed and refined over the years. But she and I have not talked about it, not as you and I are talking now. It’s an amazing story certainly. Almost mythic.”

“Exactly. It’s myths I fear, you see. That’s the whole point. I don’t mind a bereft mother or even father appearing after all these years. I fear the power of the myth. I was wondering if you could detect it: demythologize it. Isn’t that what they do in literary criticism these days?”

“All I can do is talk to Caroline, which I do anyway. And to you, if an intelligent question occurs to me. But where can this lead, except around in the same circles? Caroline isn’t desperate for the truth, resting her whole identity and future life on some revelation. Your fears seem excessive.”

“They are. They are the fears that come with the youth of senility, as another lawyer once described it. Will you just accept my trepidation as part of your agenda, one of those ‘cases’ you think about?”

“I can do that certainly,” Kate said, half amused, half
fearful of his intensity, inadequately masked. “What of the mother of the twins, the one who was reading Hardy? Is she still alive?”

“Oh yes, still a professor. And she’s never moved an inch from the story, nor have her children. It’s legend now, it’s a truth beyond truth.”

KATE HAD INTENDED
to mention the conversation with Caroline’s father the next day, when she and Caroline walked home together, as was now their custom. They lived within a few blocks of one another but never, to their amusement, met except at the university. Those few blocks separated one New York City neighborhood from another. Caroline, however, mentioned the conversation first. Her father had called her the previous night to report upon the lunch he and Kate had shared. “The general hope, I’m to gather, is that you will come to dinner with the parents from time to time, and head off the effects of any terrible revelation, or the lack of such a revelation, upon their daughter. I hope you don’t feel unduly burdened. In the beginning, my appearance from the bushes seemed a good story; I don’t know why it has become so fearsome.”

“Stories of that sort do,” Kate said. “Like the moment after an electrical failure, when the bright lights go on and the candles are scarcely visible, superfluous. Here we are, talking now about your amazing appearance, while before we used to chat on about everything, nothing outshining the rest.”

“Do you mind?” Caroline asked.

“Partly. Partly I want to shout out that it doesn’t matter how you were born or miraculously shone forth; what matters is that you have a blessed life, and the chance for an interesting future. But then I know that’s nonsense.
The question is, shall you be able eventually to forget the story, let it fade into the general history of things, or shall it keep, as they so wonderfully say in criticism today, foregrounding itself?”

“Certainly it will fade if it never changes, never gets any commentary added to it, never gets reinterpreted. Do you think you might be persuaded to go and see Henrietta Grant?”

“The mother of the twins, the one who was reading Hardy? What could I go to see her for? I could hardly request to hear the story again, as one might have asked a bard to recite the lines about Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa. I mean, if she wants to keep telling it, why not tell it to someone who hasn’t heard it before?”

“I don’t think she tells it much, or likes to. Mostly others tell it now, her children, me, Mom and Dad. It’s just that she’s got to be the answer.”

“The answer to where you came from?”

“Yes. She’s the only one who could possibly know.”

“Caroline, that’s obviously untrue. Unless she was in two places at once, and nothing in the story allows one to believe that, the only person who can possibly know is the one who set you off toward the volleyball players from behind the bushes and then crept away. And at least with the needle in the haystack, you supposedly know what haystack you lost the needle in.”

“You mean someone spotted that house, the children, the geography of the lawn, the dirt road, all of it, and just decided that was a good place to dump a baby.”

“That’s the likeliest explanation surely.”

“Perhaps. Except, Kate, I know I was a happy child, and all that, but if someone the child knows puts her down, is she likely to go running, happily gurgling the while, toward
complete strangers in a strange place? I mean, she couldn’t have known the children, but mightn’t she have known the place?”

“You’re looking for a rational explanation, my dear. That is the great temptation with a story like this. As in the Gershwin song, where the Pharaoh’s daughter is suspected of being the mother of Moses, the baby
she
found. Surely the whole point about marvelous happenings is that there isn’t any explanation, anyway not one that would satisfy a rationalist. I think that’s why your father’s so worried; he half hopes for a rational explanation, and half fears the lack of one: if you consider yourself miraculous, even miraculously adventurous for a baby, you become otherworldly, part of legend, not simply his child.”

“Does that mean I ought to look for a mundane answer, or not?”

“Myself, I’d feel tempted to accept it just as it is: be glad you landed in that place, that your parents were there to claim you when called, that you were born at a later age than most, in an improbable way. It all seems to me a kind of blessing, better than fairy godmothers around your cradle. But who am I to talk, having always known exactly where I came from, and regretting it the greater part of the time? There is, you see, the danger that you will waste your energies on the past, and miss the present and the future. I think that’s often a danger, and one worth risking only under the most extreme conditions–total despair or anxiety, for example. What can you learn from the past before you burst upon that volleyball game that’s worth knowing? That’s what I’d ask myself.”

“There’s always plain old curiosity.”

“So there is. But maybe that’s more my problem than yours. After all, I’ve made curiosity a kind of avocation. If
you give me permission, I can promise to be curious enough for both of us.”

“Does that mean you might try to discover something?”

“Probably not. It means that I’ll go on wondering; you go on living.”

“Should your curiosity ever lead to any answers, will you promise to tell me? No, don’t protest,” Caroline said, as Kate started to speak. “Let’s make it a bargain. I’ll stop thinking about the whole scene, stop even telling it to new people I meet; I’ll just say I’m adopted and let it go at that. I think you’re right about the past entrenching itself in the present and future. But if I give up this wonderful question, you have, in turn, to promise to tell me if there ever is an answer. Agreed?”

Kate agreed, and with relief. The story was beginning to frighten her in the hold it was getting on Caroline and Tom Rayley. She called Tom Rayley and told him of the bargain, urging him to forget myths and concentrate on his satisfactory daughter.

And there for a time the matter rested.

THE RESURRECTION OF
the myth was an outcome of Kate’s meeting with Henrietta Grant. They found themselves together on a panel, both last-minute substitutes; each, it later transpired, had agreed to fill in as a special favor, Henrietta to the remaining panelist, Kate to the man who had organized the panel in the first place. They were introduced five minutes before the panel began, each trying to remember where she had heard the other’s name. Both thought of Caroline as the connection during the first paper, and they nodded that recognition to one another as the man’s words on the New Historicism in the Renaissance prepared the way for Henrietta on the New Historicism in
French writing of the eighteenth century and for Kate on English writers of the nineteenth.

“Shall we have a drink?” Henrietta asked when they had answered the last of the questions and watched the audience disperse. “Or do you feel duty bound to remain for the next panel?”

“Neither duty bound nor so inclined,” Kate answered. “After all, we are substitutes; it’s not as though we had signed on for the whole bit. And even if I had, the truth is I would like to have a drink with you.” They soon settled themselves in the bar of the hotel where the conference was being held. Kate felt she deserved a martini complete with olive.