The Unwelcomed Child (19 page)

“Why?”

“Why? She’s my daughter. I’d like to get to know her.”

“If you hadn’t stopped, you’d never have known she was here.”

“I didn’t expect it. I told you that. Now I know it. So now I’d like to get to know her. Can’t you let up for a few moments, if not hours?”

“Take it easy,” Grandfather Prescott said. “I’m sure we have enough for two more plates, Myra. We’ll eat here.”

My mother smiled. “Thanks, Dad. By the way, I spoke to Uncle Brett the day before yesterday. He’s going to drop by when we’re in Atlantic City and jam with the Lovers one night.”

Grandfather Prescott nodded, almost smiling.

“He’s been doing just fine,” my mother added. She looked at my grandmother. “Not that you care, I know.”

The way my grandmother was staring back at her would turn me to stone. It was as if she could drill her rage from her eyes and into my mother’s eyes. I saw the way my mother avoided her gaze. She looked at me.

“Can we go for a little walk and talk? As I said, I’d like to get to know you.”

“What for?” my grandmother asked.

“I keep saying that I never expected to find her here, Mom,” she said, her lips tight. “Figure it out.”

“If you called or came back, you would have known. And don’t blame that all on us.”

“Well, I didn’t. Now I’m here. Can I talk to my daughter?”

“It’s all right, Myra,” Grandfather Prescott said.

“Why is it all right?”

“I’m not going to poison her mind,” my mother said.

“How could you help it?” Grandmother Myra said. “I warn you. We’ve devoted our lives to giving her a good, moral upbringing.”

“I’m sure you have, but I couldn’t ruin that with one conversation, could I?” my mother countered.

“Satan had only one conversation with Eve.”

My mother laughed and nodded at me, then raised her arms and looked about the house. “I wouldn’t say she’s living in Eden.”

Grandmother Myra looked as if her face would explode.

My grandfather reached for her hand. “Don’t prolong this,” he told her. “It won’t do either of you any good.”

She shook herself like a dog shaking off water or someone who had just suffered a chill. “I’m not going to waste time debating good and evil with you, Deborah. I lost that battle long ago. I’ve got to prepare dinner,” she said. She looked at me. “You have to set the table before you do anything with her.”

I nodded.

Carlos told Grandfather Prescott that he had a very special aperitif from Mexico that he’d like to share with him.

“I’ll just get it from the car,” he said.

“We don’t drink alcoholic beverages,” Grandmother Myra said.

“Oh, you can just taste it. You don’t drink much of it before dinner,” Carlos said.

She looked at Grandfather Prescott, expecting him to agree, but he didn’t. “Do what you want,” she snapped at him. “I have work.”

She glanced at me, and we went into the kitchen. I was actually trembling with the possibility of a private conversation with my mother. It was something I often had fantasized, and here it was about to happen. I was afraid I would drop a plate or silverware when I set the table. I did it quickly and then went out to the living room. My mother had been talking to my grandfather. Carlos had gone out to the car and was still there. They looked up at me.

“Where should we walk? In the woods or on the road?”

I looked at Grandfather Prescott.

“Better just walk a little on the road, Deborah,” he said.

She stood up and held out her hand. “C’mon,” she said.

I looked back toward the kitchen to see if Grandmother Myra had changed her mind and would pop out to forbid it. She didn’t, so I moved quickly to take my mother’s hand. We went out and paused on the front porch as Carlos was hurrying back from the car.

“I forgot we buried it under all that luggage and stuff,” he said.

“Get my mother to drink some, and I’ll give you a medal,” she told him. “She could sure use something to loosen her up.”

He laughed and went into the house. We started toward the road.

“Which direction do you prefer?” she asked.

I remembered what Mason had told me about walking to his house and said we should go right. For a few long moments, she didn’t speak. She just walked beside me, her arms folded, her head down. I was afraid that might be all we would actually do, but she finally laughed. I paused.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I’m having trouble believing they kept you. Never once during these years did I ever consider that a possibility,” she said, and described how they had reacted to her being pregnant.

“They were always so concerned about their reputation in the community. Mom never let Dad go to work in his factory without wearing a jacket and tie, even in the very warm months. She scrutinized every employee they had with a magnifying glass. The CIA probably doesn’t check its applicants as thoroughly as my mother checked theirs. By the time I was twelve and starting to look more like a girl than a boy, I couldn’t appear at the factory unless I was . . .” She raised her hands and with two fingers of each hand drew quotes in the air. “‘Properly dressed.’ Heaven forbid I had a button on my blouse undone. I imagine it hasn’t been much different for you. Probably, it’s been worse. Am I right?”

I nodded. I didn’t want her to stop telling me about herself and how my grandparents were as parents.

“I swear,” she said, “half the things I did, I did just to annoy her. The more she said no to something, the more I wanted to do it. Is that the way you feel?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t tell me she’s done a better brainwashing job on you than she did on me. Actually, I’m sure she did. They were afraid of you,” she added, and described the day I was born, how they had prayed and looked at me, expecting to see some sign of Satan.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” she continued as we walked. “I wanted and expected that they would arrange for an abortion. I was betting on their concern for their precious pure reputation. How could they tolerate an unmarried daughter walking about pregnant in this small town, but they solved that.”

“How?”

“They practically kept me prisoner in that house,” she said. She looked at me. I nodded, and she saw that was something I understood. “That’s how they’ve kept you,” she said, concluding quickly. “Do you go to school?” she asked immediately, sounding like a detective reaching a conclusion.

“Not yet. This fall.”

“So she . . . what do they call it? Homeschooled you?”

“Yes.”

“She got away with that this long?”

“I take periodic exams. She was a teacher. I always do well.”

“I know she was a teacher. She never let me forget it. Every poor grade I brought home was like another nail in my coffin. How could I, the daughter of a teacher, be such a bad student? Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t that bad, just bad in her terms. I was better than average, good enough to get into the state university. So what do you like? I know you like art, and you sing.”

“I like reading. I don’t mind math, and I really like science.”

She nodded. “You’re more like her than I am.”

“No, I’m not,” I said quickly. It made her smile.

“Maybe you aren’t. She’s kept you from knowing who you are, I’m sure. You probably have had no chance to have a boyfriend, even secretly.”

I didn’t say anything, but that just widened her eyes.

“Do you?”

“No,” I said. I was afraid she would mention Mason at dinner. “I dream,” I told her, and she laughed and nodded.

“Yes, that’s what you do in my mother’s house, dream, dream of getting out. I think that urge drove me more than anything to flee. I would have ended up on my face if it weren’t for my uncle Brett. He took me in and got me a job on a cruise ship he was booked on with his band. Later, he got me a job in one of the dance clubs he played in, and once in a while, I sang with his band. I was married for a while, a short while, to another musician before Carlos. He had wandering eyes. Carlos is more stable. I hope.”

She paused.

“You’re no child, but I’ll bet you don’t know any more about sex than the average ten-year-old.”

I felt myself blush but not with shyness, more with anger. “I know more than a ten-year-old. I read. I . . .”

“My point is, she hasn’t been much help in that area, I’m sure. I don’t know what kind of sex my parents had.” She told me the joke about the hole in the sheet. I tried not to look astonished that she would talk about her own parents that way. “Don’t worry about it,” she added as we continued walking. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out when you have to. It comes natural.”

I paused when Mason and Claudine’s summerhouse came into view. I was afraid they would see me and come out.

“Maybe we should turn back,” I said.

“Okay. If I knew you were here, I would have brought you something, something decent to wear, for sure, not that she would permit it. She might even cut it up at night or something. She did that to many of the things I bought on my own. We were constantly at each other. Dad tried to referee, but he was outgunned.”

I nodded and smiled, picturing what it must have been like.

“There’s something about you that tells me you’re going to be all right. I think you have enough of me in you to survive.”

Enough of you,
I thought. What about what I had of my biological father?

“Can you tell me what happened? I mean . . .”

“How I got pregnant? I’m sure she told you I was raped. I was,” she added quickly. “It wasn’t one of those rapes where someone breaks in and attacks you or anything. I was drugged, the famous rape drug, at a party.”

“Was he ever caught?”

“No. I mean, I knew who he was. I wasn’t that out of it.”

“How did it happen?”

“He was one of a group of local Albany boys, Sean Barrett. His father owned a bar and restaurant on Greene Street. My girlfriends and I hung out there with him and his friends. We could get whatever we wanted to drink. I mean, they weren’t even college guys. College guys were too immature for us. These guys were dangerous, cruder, but hip, if you know what I mean.”

I shook my head.

“Yeah, right. How would you know? Anyway, for us, it was like playing with fire. Maybe I got too close, but that didn’t give him the right to do what he did. Smile or turn your shoulder flirtatiously at a boy, and he’ll think he owns you. Take my word for it. Unless,” she said, smiling, “you want him to think he owns you. Nothing wrong with that.

“Anyway, I didn’t even see it coming. I should have realized how deep I was in. I wasn’t about to get too involved with him or any of them. I still had high hopes, not for the life my mother had planned for me but a better life. You know, fall in love with someone rich as easily as you do with someone poor or average like Sean Barrett. I didn’t have a chance to fall in love anyway.

“Afterward,” she continued, “I was too embarrassed about it and didn’t even tell some of my closer friends. I never thought I was pregnant, so that was an even bigger shock. I was so ashamed about it that I didn’t tell anyone, especially my parents. I was in denial, you see. Months passed, and I knew I was pregnant, but I wouldn’t face up to it. When I started to show, I got on a bus and came home from college.”

She paused and looked toward our house.

“You know how when you’re a little girl, and you cut yourself or something, and you run home to Mommy or Daddy, who you expect will fix it and make you feel better and comfort you? Well, that was how I was when I stepped off that bus and walked to that house. I was coming home so my parents would make me feel better and fix it, but not my mother. It was almost as if she was waiting for something like that to happen, just so she could drive home a lesson she had been teaching me all my life. She was determined to make me pay.”

“But you were drugged and then raped.”

“No difference to her. I’m sure she will be the same with you if something bad happens to you. It will be your fault somehow. You put yourself in that place. If I hadn’t gone to that party, if I wasn’t drinking and flirting with riff-raff, bad things wouldn’t happen to me. See?”

“Yes.”

She brushed my hair with her left hand. “When I look at you now, I’m very happy that she wanted me to suffer.”

“Do I look like him?” I asked, and held my breath.

“I don’t even remember what he looked like anymore,” she replied. “I see only me in your face.”

She sounded just the way I had imagined her in my dream, making me feel like I was some kind of immaculate conception.

“Well, I can’t make these fifteen years up to you overnight, but I promise I will stay in contact with you now. Someday we’ll spend some real quality time together. When you break out of the chains and you can be on your own, you’ll come to me. Not that I have accumulated great wisdom,” she said. “I’ve knocked around, and some of what I’ve learned might help you survive out there. Speaking of that, has Uncle Brett been here much? He doesn’t like talking about them, so I don’t ask. I haven’t seen him in a few years now.”

“No. I’ve never met him,” I said. “I only heard about him a few times. I saw pictures of him, but they were taken when he was much younger. I don’t recall him ever calling.”

“Mom’s probably his most disliked person. She wouldn’t welcome him and let him know it whenever she could. As I said, he helped me survive when I ran off, gave me money, helped me find work. I told him what had happened to me and what they had done. He was very angry and promised he would never tell them where I was or what I was doing.” She thought a moment. “It would be just like him to keep the fact that you were living here a secret from me. He thought that would be painful for me, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about him. As I said, I don’t remember them talking about him except what he was like years ago.”

She thought about it a moment and then smiled. “I bet he doesn’t know you’re here. It would be just like my mother to make sure my father never told him.”

She laughed.

“Isn’t he going to be surprised? I think he went on the road at an early age to escape his family as much as for any other reason. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Many people I know have little to do with their relatives, but I promise,” she added quickly, “I’ll have more to do with you. If you want me to, of course, but I can’t take you with me,” she quickly added. “I couldn’t weigh down my new marriage with the responsibility for a teenage girl just yet. Maybe later you can come to spend some time with us.”