The Third Child (13 page)

It was one of the boarded-up buildings he was heading for, around the
back and down the steps into the dark, dank cellar. She hesitated to follow him, but she had seen tough-looking kids on the street, and she wasn’t about to stand out there in her best blue sweater and tight low-rider jeans while he disappeared. She inched down the broken stairs behind him.

“Lacy,” he was calling. “Lacy, are you here?”

A kid’s head dimly appeared upstairs. “Come on up here. We’re waiting.”

She followed him up. A woman—maybe she was thirty? Maybe younger? Her hair was dirty and her clothes, shapeless, so it was hard to guess—was squatting wrapped in a torn blanket. They had a fire going in a garbage can in the middle of the floor, so the room reeked of smoke. Two children besides the boy who had yelled down to them were sharing another blanket, sitting on plastic milk delivery crates. Along one wall was a greenish couch with broken springs sticking out and a table covered with cigarette burns. In another corner was a stained mattress. The room was dim and smoky—no electricity, of course, no heat. They kind of smelled as she got close. The woman was Lacy, the kids Sammy, Gina and Terry. She couldn’t tell if Terry was a boy or a girl, the littlest kid mummified in a down jacket much too big, held together with a woman’s belt so that the child looked like a badly wrapped package. The woman was white, but the kids were mixed.

“I brought you sandwiches from my mother,” Blake said. “This is my girlfriend, Melissa.”

“You know each other from college?” Lacy asked. “I want my kids to go to college when they get old enough, so they never end up like me.” She took the bag of sandwiches Blake had pulled from under his jacket. Using an old jackknife, she cut a sandwich into quarters and gave a bit to each of her children. “You thank your mama for us. She’s a good woman.” She ate the last quarter.

“How do you know Blake’s mother?” Melissa asked, watching the kids gulp down the sandwich sections.

“She tried to help us when they were tearing down our building. She tried to keep a roof over our heads, bless her. But the law, they wouldn’t let us stay.”

“Mama, give us some more,” Sammy said. “That wasn’t nothing.”

“Anything. Wasn’t anything,” Lacy corrected him, and cut up another sandwich. “I was almost graduated from high school when I got pregnant with Sammy. I know my grammar.”

Silently, seriously the children chewed, and when they had finished, Lacy ate the last quarter of the second sandwich. “Now that’s enough for now. We’ll have the rest for supper. So how are you doing? You got a girlfriend again, good for you. I bet your mama is proud of you.”

“Are you living here?” Melissa asked. She couldn’t imagine camping in a building without heat or windows or plumbing or furniture. They might as well be in the alley.

“For a month now. It’s a good place. But they’re going to tear it down too, pretty soon.”

“Wouldn’t you be better off with the children in a shelter?” She had heard of homeless shelters.

“We’re on two lists. But they say it will be at least another year.”

“There’s a long waiting list for all the shelters,” Blake said. “Too many homeless, not enough funds. Governor Dickinson cut the funding.”

“What I really want is for Sammy to be able to go to school. It hurts me that he can’t because we don’t live anyplace legal, you know?”

As they finally left, she saw Blake hand Lacy something. “What did you give her?” she asked.

“A twenty. I don’t have much cash. Fortunately, my parents don’t observe Christmas, so I don’t have to buy five hundred presents.”

He had told her not to buy him anything. She had been very disappointed, because she had wanted to shop for him. She had felt it would make it all more real to her, that she had her lover to buy things for. She had wanted him to give her something, but he disdained the holidays, he made that clear. He wouldn’t let her celebrate his birthday either. She loved birthdays. “Why doesn’t Lacy get a job and move into an apartment?”

“Are you insane? Who’d hire her, unwashed, in dirty clothes? And what would she do with her kids? She doesn’t have money for a deposit, to get electricity turned on, to pay rent. She’s screwed, and your father’s insistence when he was governor on cutting back social programs keeps
her on the bottom. I just wanted you to see what one of these people he dismisses looks like—to make her a little bit real to you. Then, when the time comes, you have some material to use to change his mind about the homeless.”

“Well, you did that.”

She minded that all their time got used up educating her, giving her a social policy lesson. She was half glad she was leaving for Emily’s in the morning.

SHE LOVED BEING
at Emily’s with her laid-back parents. The dogs came bounding toward them the moment they entered the house that smelled of cinnamon and balsam and dog, filled with music bubbling out of the speakers, some kind of Baroque wind ensemble. Emily’s parents made an occasion of holidays, lavishing presents on each other. Emily was wearing a new cabled turtleneck cashmere in dark red that was just gorgeous. The presents Melissa got tended to the dull and preppy. She knew that Rosemary had no time to shop and little interest. Alison figured out what to get each of them and then wrapped the gifts impeccably, beautifully—just like a department store. There was nothing wrong with her presents except that they didn’t feel personal. She had a new jacket dress in navy, a Coach purse and shoes and belt, all matching as if anybody cared, a pale pink cashmere sweater set, cross-country skis, which she had mentioned at some point last year and promptly forgotten.

The tree at Emily’s was fanciful, almost too big for their livingroom and hung with ornaments made of shells and dried flowers and old jewelry, besides the usual balls and glass creatures from Bloomingdale’s. One of the dogs ate part of a wreath and barfed in the hall while they were all sitting around the tree singing carols. Nobody got excited. Nobody freaked. Emily’s dad cleaned it up. If only the food wasn’t so weird and full of crusty grains that stuck in her teeth, she would think she was in heaven. They had a winter squash soufflé and a salad with seaweed. But there was a lot of wine, and nobody minded if she drank it. She did and got droopy by nine thirty. Emily’s bedroom had a view of a saltwater
marsh, although it was too dark to see anything. Still, she liked knowing it was there. In summer when she visited, they opened the windows and she could smell its clean funkiness.

“It’s a drag, having a beautiful mother,” Melissa confided. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind it if she just knitted afghans or raised Irish setters. It must be wonderful to have a mother you can hope to excel. I mean, your mother’s nice enough, but she isn’t Mrs. America. Everybody admires Rosemary. She does everything better. Everyone says, Oh, she’s so beautiful, oh, she’s so smart, she always knows the right thing to do. Can you imagine living with that? It drives me crazy. I was born fourth best, and I’ll feel that way my entire life.”

“Nonsense. Your mother isn’t a musician, or a painter, or a great humanitarian like that guy who went to Africa, Schweitzer, whatever. She dresses pretty dull. She isn’t a great cook. She isn’t a famous athlete. She never flew to the South Pole or climbed Mount Everest or swam the English Channel or went around the world alone in a sailboat. She never starred in a porn movie or fucked a rock star. I bet she never fucked anybody but your father. She never got a dish named after her or had a horse at the Kentucky Derby. So she’s left you a lot of room, idiot. Take advantage of it. Be
you,
not a second-rate
her.
”

“Em, sometimes you are so wise it gives me a bellyache.” Melissa knelt on the bed kowtowing to Emily. “I shall follow your words, O wise and righteous one. I will follow your path to total contentment.”

“You should,” Emily said. “I wish we were allowed to have pets in the dorm. If we had a dog, we’d both be happier. Dogs make me much happier than guys. Want to hear something gross? I got herpes from that guy Winston I fucked at school. I went to a gynecologist two towns over so my parents won’t know. I hate VDs. They’re so personal, and they hurt where it counts…. So how’s your main man?”

“Trying to improve me,” Melissa said. “I suppose that’s a good sign? That he’s really interested?” She told Emily about Lacy.

Emily shrugged. “It would be nicer if he showed it by giving you perfume or chocolates or a pretty bracelet, wouldn’t it? Who wants to be improved? Maybe computers. Not me, and I bet not you.”

But Melissa was not sure. She remembered the woman that Blake had taken her to meet. Lacy’s concerns did not revolve around what was said about her on the evening news. Her father had sacrificed ten thousand and one Lacys in order to reduce the state budget and cut taxes, always popular with the voters until they experienced the impact on roads, schools, water and air quality, monitoring of safety in food and health care. But they never seemed to put that erosion of quality together with the lowering of taxes. Cutting taxes got her father reelected and elected to higher office. Lacy couldn’t vote, for she had no address. She didn’t count. So Melissa had to make her count, had to remember her, had to act on her behalf.

Maybe if her father had met Lacy, he would change his mind. She wondered if Dick had ever actually met a homeless person. She imagined bringing her father down to meet Lacy, but she had no idea how to manage that. She could fantasize to her heart’s content about influencing a more humane policy on her father’s part, but secretly she doubted she could ever do it. She would have to explain how she had met Lacy. She would have to claim some of her father’s extremely busy time. He had things to do, always, people to meet, important legislation hanging fire, position papers to go over, reporters to see, TV programs to prepare for, fund-raisers to attend. He lived in a different world than Lacy did, and the two just didn’t overlap. Was it his fault? How could she imagine for a moment that he wasn’t more important? He was a senator. Blake just didn’t understand that her father couldn’t keep track of every citizen, every detail. Blake wasn’t fair to him, just as Dick wasn’t fair to Lacy. That was just how it was and how it had always been, after all. What could she do about it? Blake was an idealist and that was sweet and she loved him for it, but her father was a realist first and foremost—the way a man in power had to be, as she had grown up knowing. Power wasn’t left lying around in piles in the street. To get something done required a huge amount of politicking, she understood that far better than Blake did—or Phil, that know-it-all. There was a lot she knew, from growing up in her family, that other people just couldn’t understand. It took money, it took time, it took years and years of work to get anything done in government. She felt as if she had put things back in perspective.

Didn’t Blake admire his stepfather? Lawyers did far sleazier things than senators did. They defended rapists and murderers and thugs and tried to set them free, back into society to do it again. Really, maybe she should suggest to Phil and Blake that they investigate Blake’s stepfather. She felt safe with Emily, so that she almost didn’t mind being away from Blake for a few days. She should not let him push her around so much, let him manipulate her into things she was uncomfortable doing. She would learn some skills from Phil, but that would be the extent of it. She’d give him a couple of Saturday afternoons, then ease out of the entanglement. Quietly she would regain control. And if she educated herself about politics and her father’s career in the process, so much the better. Finally she would manage to grab his attention during one of her visits home and impress him with how much she had learned. Maybe Blake’s idea of persuading Dick to change would work, although when she was away from Blake she could not imagine it; but at least she could finally command her father’s respect. He never talked politics with Merilee even, only with Rosemary and Rich. But she would change that. She would learn enough to make him listen to her.

A
t school, Melissa settled into her comfortable daily routines with Fern and Emily, eating breakfast together and often supper, washing their hair at the same time, doing their laundry, trimming each other’s ends. She practiced French with Emily; Fern tried to teach her to play squash. Emily had become friendly with Fern, mostly to escape her annoying roommate. Melissa saw Blake almost every day for lunch, and they spent at least four evenings a week together. She stopped fearing that he would lose interest in her. Home was just overbooked and hectic for him. She began to feel a weak but strengthening confidence, like a pale little seedling groping toward light. Blake loved her, if not as strongly as she loved him, still more than she had ever been loved. It was what she had dreamed about all those misfit years.

One day in early March, the sky opened into blue and the breeze smelled faintly of salt and warmth, all the way up from the Gulf Stream. It promised,
spring
. Blake took her out on his bike, up into the hills, where snow still covered the ground except on south-facing slopes. They did not make love in their old spot—it was soggy with melting snow, the ground underneath frozen hard as a slab of granite. But the exhilaration of traveling behind him with the wind rushing through them as if they rode the clouds came back to her. He was perfect and beautiful, she felt, clutching him, pressing her cheek into his leather.

Fern said to her one evening when they were alone, “There’s something I want to talk with you about.” She seemed very nervous.

“I know I’m sloppy,” Melissa said. “I don’t mean to bury the room in dirty or half-dirty clothes.”

“It’s not that,” Fern said. “It’s something personal.” But just then Ronnie came bounding in to announce a party on the floor Friday night.

The next day, the second Thursday of March, Melissa walked into her room to find Fern waiting to hand her a piece of paper, a message that Rosemary had called. She felt a shiver of apprehension. Her mother e-mailed her weekly, more often if something she considered important occurred or was about to. To call was unusual. She went to her afternoon French class with Emily before she used her phone. Had Rosemary learned about Blake?

She got Alison. “Rosemary is in conference with Senator Dawes at the moment. But she was calling you with bad news—your grandfather has suffered a stroke. Your mother is extremely worried about his condition.”

“Grandfather Dickinson? Is he going to die?”

“He’s receiving the best possible care. But your parents want you to be ready to go north. Rich and Laura are driving up, and they’ll call you en route and let you know when to expect them. Keep your cell phone on, please.”

“A friend could drive me up there….”

“It’s best to confine this to family. The Senator is very upset. You know he’s always been close to his father. I won’t be able to accompany Rosemary. She needs me here to keep things running….” Alison sounded devastated. Melissa wanted to beg Alison to go in her place.

Melissa didn’t think Grandpa was close to anyone, but she wasn’t about to argue with Alison. Oh, god, she really didn’t want to go up to Vermont with Rich and Laura. She didn’t want to go up there at all. When she was a kid, she had sometimes liked the farm. That wasn’t because of Grandpa Dickinson, who let you know at once he was from an old and proud family, even if their money had long ago been squandered. Still, he had 115 acres of partly valley and partly mountain land where he raised dairy cattle, made awful cheese and grew Christmas trees. Every year at Christmas, he sent them a big round of his cheddar, of the flavor and consistency of a huge gum eraser, with the tang of laundry soap. It resembled the harsh yellow soap that she remembered Noreen, her favorite nanny, using on them when they got into poison ivy.

She packed lightly, hoping Rosemary would not make her stay long. She had the excuse of school. They were going to pose for a solidarity portrait, affirming familial devotion. She called Blake to let him know what was happening.

“That’s terrible, babes. Are you close to him?”

“Not remotely. It’s just a ceremonial thing.”

When Rich arrived, he said, “Got to repack, kiddo. Black. The old guy died this afternoon. He had a second massive stroke in the hospital, and he’s gone.”

She did not know what to feel. She didn’t like her grandpa—he was a mean and miserly man who seemed to love only his Guernsey cows, although he certainly had some kind of respect for his son. Now he was dead. She had never before experienced a death in the family. She tried to find some sense of awe or regret. She wanted to feel something; she must be shallow to lack emotion. Some people were close to their grandparents. Emily liked her grandma. She wished Blake could go with her. He would know what she should feel, what she should think about Grandpa’s death, even though he had no real, blood grandparents. But he did have adopted family in plenty, and he seemed closer to them than she had believed before Christmas. He had, she suspected, pretended to be more alienated, more distant from his family than he was, perhaps to seem more like her. In a way, that pretense was flattering. She tried to imagine Grandpa Dickinson dead. Did it hurt to die of stroke? Did someone know when they were dying? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine.

She sent Blake a fast e-mail and stuffed her laptop into her backpack. Laura and Rich sat in front; she was in back with luggage. Laura drove silently for the first three hours while Rich talked on his cell phone. Then he took over. While he drove, he talked. “Never expected Grandpa to go so fast. He was only seventy-seven, up with the cows. Skinny and tough as leather.”

“Rich, what was Grandma like?” Melissa asked. She was trying to remember something that would make her sad.

A longish silence. “Haven’t the faintest idea. Never met her. She died years and years ago of heart trouble.”

Laura spoke for almost the first time, except to read the map and give directions. “The way everyone in the Dickinson family talks, you’d think your grandfather gave birth to his three children himself. She’s been erased.”

“Probably nothing to say about her. The old man was a strong character,” Rich said.

“I never heard Father mention her,” Melissa said. Three children always startled her. She forgot Edward—a lieutenant who died in Vietnam. He was trotted out from time to time in her father’s speeches, along with free enterprise, the market economy, family values and order in our schools and on our streets. A photo of him in uniform was all she knew of Uncle Edward.

“Ask Dad if you want to,” Rich said. “So how’s school?”

The Dickinson family house was white clapboard on a bumpity drive that led straight up from the main road. They drove past the dark meadows with the moon eerily shining on the snow heaped over everything, to arrive at last on the circle of gravel before the house. The Dickinson home was symmetrical except for the outbuildings that straggled away joined by covered passageways: the barn, the henhouse, the woodshed, the shed that held tools and a tractor. It was clearly an old farmhouse, but it had a row of pillars supporting a semicircular porch, as if claiming to be a mansion instead. She remembered it as being always too hot or too cold.

There were several cars outside, including a rented car her parents must have taken from the nearest airport. Merilee’s blue Miata was there. An old pickup that belonged to Grandpa was parked at an odd angle to the drive, to make room for the other cars and perhaps cars yet to come. She wondered where Grandpa’s body was. She had been to many political funerals over the years, including “Uncle” Tony’s. Rosemary had never liked Tony; she felt an alliance with him reflected poorly on Dick once he became governor. Melissa had eavesdropped on their argument.

Dick said firmly, “He helped me. I never let down someone who lent a hand.”

“But he’s an old ethnic loser, lucky to be a city judge. Why promote him?”

“Because loyalty is more important than who he is. He promoted me.” It was one of the few times she had heard her father disagree vehemently with Rosemary. Rosemary had backed down.

She heard her father’s resonant voice as she trudged after Laura and Rich into the entrance hall that bisected the downstairs. “Yes, I remember Mother laid out in the parlor. That was how they did it in those days. The undertaker fetched the body and then brought her back. It was more intimate, but a bit hard on kids, as you might imagine. Having the deceased there in the house. Of course it wasn’t that way with Edward. When his remains were flown back, he was buried in Arlington. Full military honors. Rifle salute and all.”

“It must have been traumatic for you having your departed mother in the parlor,” Rosemary said soothingly. “I think it’s a little…I don’t know, barbaric?”

“It was the custom,” Dick said. “Karen was more frightened than I was.”

“Rich!” Rosemary trotted to meet them. She always wore heels. Even her bedroom slippers had heels. She was wearing a black suit, looking radiant in spite of the day’s travels and what had to be exhaustion, getting everyone on the road, making arrangements. “Laura, you look lovely. Melissa, good, you got here. The viewing will be tomorrow. We have a funeral breakfast the next morning and then the service and burial in the family cemetery. We still have paperwork on that. Then of course the will.”

“Where’s Merilee?” Melissa asked, looking around.

“She’s in the kitchen with Grandpa Dickinson’s housekeeper. We’ve been holding supper till everyone arrives.”

“Who else is coming?”

“I think we’re all here now. Karen should arrive tomorrow.”

“Is Karen out?” Melissa asked. Her favorite aunt had been confined to an institution for the last five years. Melissa understood it had something to do with her drinking.

“Well, she had to be released to attend the funeral,” Rosemary said. “I do hope she’ll behave herself.”

It was hard for Melissa to imagine that Karen drank any harder than her parents or their friends. Even now everyone had a martini or a scotch grasped in their hands.

“Where’s Billy? Isn’t he coming?”

Rosemary ran her hand over her fine-boned face in a gesture of fatigue. “He went out with the hired man to the cows, who knows why? As if Billy could tell which end of a cow the milk comes from.”

Melissa tossed her backpack against a wall until she would be assigned a room, then followed the hall to the kitchen, always the warmest room in the house, with a big old-fashioned coal stove to heat it and a huge equally old propane stove for cooking. Merilee was sitting at the white enamel table slicing carrots, while a woman probably in her late thirties stood at the stove stirring a large pot. “So I told him he should hire someone to make cheese. The cows are good cows. Anybody with some training could make fine cheese, but you know, he was a stubborn old man and he liked best to do things his own way.”

“Melissa!” Merilee waved a languid hand to her. She had been drinking beer with the housekeeper. Merilee seldom drank, as far as Melissa knew, and she looked sleepy. Maybe she was just tired from traveling like everyone else. “Come on in. You know Liz Greene? She’s been our grandfather’s housekeeper for the last three years, since Ellen left.”

Liz dried her hands on a big white apron to touch hands with Melissa. “You’re the youngest?”

“No, Billy is. I’m the third from the top.”

“You probably knew Ellen, then. She worked here twenty years, but she just plain got tired, she said.” Liz had a thin horsey face with almost white hair, a natural blond with a little grey in it. Her hand was firm, callused and very warm. She turned to Merilee. “How are those carrots coming?”

“Slowly,” Merilee said with a little giggle.

“I can help,” Melissa said, and took a seat at the kitchen table. Even
when her grandfather was alone, he always took his meals in the diningroom under the chandelier that hung a little crooked, as if it had been moved from someplace more grand. She began chopping carrots twice as fast as Merilee. Here was one thing she could do better than her sister. Maybe she should become a cook. “What are you making?” she asked Liz.

“A big beef and vegetable soup to feed the multitudes,” Liz said wryly. “I had no idea I’d be cooking for so many, but probably this weekend is the last time I’ll cook in this kitchen. What do you suppose they’ll do with the house? Put it on the market, I expect.”

“Grandpa left a will. He was always rewriting it, but he certainly had one,” Merilee said. “He had contempt for people who died intestate.”

“Leave it to his son, I expect, and he’ll sell it.”

“Grandpa was crazy about his cows,” Melissa said. “He said they were kinder and more useful than people. He knows my father has no interest.”

Liz shrugged. “They’re good healthy cows. He’s got ten of them now and a calf.”

“He used to have a bull,” Melissa remembered. The bull had chased her and Billy once. They’d had to scramble over the fence.

“Not while I’ve been coming here. I expect that was when he had a bigger herd. It wouldn’t pay him to keep a bull these days.”

Merilee had her head propped wearily on her hand. “I was up all night preparing for an exam today and then Mother called. I was planning to come tomorrow. I hated to postpone the exam. That professor doesn’t care who dies, it’s unimportant compared to his exam. But Mother wouldn’t let me off…. He said he’d have his assistant give it to me Monday, so I have to keep studying.”

“Do you like law school?” She was making conversation, feeling like an imitation adult. Asking questions she did not care about was a very adult thing.

“I mostly like it, although it would get me killed by my fellow students to admit it.” Merilee sat up. Her blond hair, so similar to Rosemary’s, gleamed under the overhead bulb. She was the one who had their mother’s looks, although they had not come out quite so fine boned and
angular on her. Merilee was more of a cheerleader type, Melissa thought, pretty rather than beautiful. Melissa would have settled for pretty. “I like solving problems. I like case law. I may go into litigation.” Merilee slumped again. “Did Rich or Laura tell you?”