The Third Child (19 page)

“How did you happen to name him Blake? Is it a family name?”

“Oh, he was named that by his father,” Nadine said. “I think it was in honor of the poet Blake and his stand against superstition and oppression.”

How did they know about his father? She was very confused, but she did not want to make a point of questioning them in front of Blake, who had immediately changed the subject to what he was hoping to get out of his classes this fall. If both his parents were unknown, as he had told her, how come they knew his mother was white and his father admired Blake, the English poet? “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night….” That was the one. She had been reading him at Miss Porter’s for a paper. She shivered suddenly.

“Somebody walked over your grave,” Sara said. They were sitting side by side in the booth and Sara had felt her reaction. “That’s what my bubba always says.”

“The air-conditioning is a little high,” Melissa said defensively.

“I hate air-conditioning,” Nadine said. “My body’s thermostat is set too low and I’m always chilly. I’m the only woman I ever knew who enjoyed her hot flashes.”

“Mother!” Sara said. “Don’t be gross. Who wants the last dumpling?”

Melissa didn’t think she was scoring high with them. If only she could think of something brilliant to say that would win them over. But startling statements were not her forte. She was a plodder, excelling, when she did, by simple stubborn persistence and remembering to cross every
t
and dot every
i.

“So what does your father do?” Si asked.

The question she had dreaded. She did not see how, when asked directly, she could lie. “He’s in the government,” she said softly.

“What does he do in the government?” Nadine persisted.

Blake threw her a warning look, but what good could it do to lie now, when they would surely find out. “He’s a senator.”

“Dickinson,” Nadine said. “Oh my god, your father is Dick Dickinson?”

She nodded.

Everyone looked at her and at Blake.

“My old enemy,” Si said. “Well, this is a surprise.”

“She didn’t ask for him to be her father,” Blake said. “She’s a good person. You can’t hold her father against her.”

“But don’t you see?” Nadine said. “It’s the Capulets and the Montagues. You can’t hope that who your families are won’t enter into it.”

Sara was grinning as if she had known all along. Had Blake told her? Was that why she had come along? To see the fireworks.

“I’d prefer, I’d really very much prefer that you don’t talk about her father until you know Melissa better. Then we can discuss him.”

“Why didn’t you warn us?” Nadine laid her chopsticks in an X across her plate as if to forbid herself to eat more.

“Exactly because of how you’re reacting. I didn’t want her father to be the focus. I didn’t want her to end up having to defend him just because he’s her father when she doesn’t agree with him ninety percent of the time. I wanted—I still want—you to get to know Melissa for herself. I won’t even discuss her father now and I won’t let her discuss him.” Blake half rose in his seat.

Sara pushed him down. “Let’s not go there. Enough with the Actors Studio scene. So you guys don’t like her father. Blake’s not fucking the Senator. Let’s cool it. I like Melissa—what I’ve seen of her—and Blake’s crazy about her. Why not give him credit for knowing her better than we do?”

No, Melissa decided, Sara had come along because Blake had asked her to. She was on his side. Whatever might be his real position in the Ackerman family, he had a loyal supporter, and that he had never told her. Maybe he just took his adopted sister’s support for granted. Melissa was confused by the family dynamics. They were warmer than her own family, more argumentative. She could not say she felt comfortable with them. She could not tell herself she had won them over. She didn’t understand Blake’s relationship with the older Ackermans, with his sister, with this entire densely populated and very involved clan. She had dozens of questions to ask him, and a queasy suspicion that he wasn’t going to
answer them readily. That he would, when she began to question him, pull that number of starting an argument and scaring her into apologies. He knew where her buttons were, and he knew how to push them. But she had to be proud that he had finally introduced her to his family; and maybe the worst was over on that front. Maybe the worst was over.

M
elissa decided that on the whole Blake’s parents had behaved better than hers. They had stopped their interrogation when Blake demanded they do so. He must wield a little more power in his family than she did in hers. They hadn’t made a scene about her not being Jewish. Further, Blake’s parents knew they were involved, whereas her parents had made all that fuss about someone who as far as they knew was just an acquaintance from school. Yes, in the congeniality contest, his parents won hands down, although the evening had been tense.

She waited to see if there would be any negative reaction in Blake’s attitude toward her, but instead he complimented her on not losing her cool under questioning. “They’re not happy, but they’re prepared to act civilized. They’ll tell each other it’s just a passing thing, and they’ll wait for it to pass.”

“I wanted them to like me. I wanted that so bad.”

“Sara liked you.”

“Yeah, but she’s in Texas. A lot of good that does us.”

“Oh, she can make her opinions felt, don’t doubt that. Besides, I think she’ll break up with her boyfriend and come back. She’s getting tired of his fuck-ups. He went out to L.A. with the grand scheme of being a screenwriter, but he’s a bartender in a sleazy bar in Austin.”

She frowned, sitting on his bed against the wall with a pillow behind her. “I know your parents are supposed to be crack lawyers, but I have trouble imagining that. Especially Nadine.”

He grinned at her, shaking his head. “Many a prosecutor has thought the same and gone down in flames. She comes on grandmotherly. She
charms the jury. Then she goes for the jugular, always with an air of just cleaning things up. Don’t let the little pigeon body and sweet smiles fool you. She has a serrated mind. And Si is one of the top ten in the country at what he does. Criminal cases and a lot of appeals.”

An e-mail message was waiting for her from Rosemary that evening, although it wasn’t Friday, only Wednesday.

Blake would also be reading this message, since he monitored Rosemary’s e-mail. She was furious. How dare they essentially forbid her to bring a friend into the house because of what his father had done in previous elections? Was she supposed to befriend only descendants of people who had laid money on Dick?

A message came from Blake almost immediately:

She e-mailed him back:

“Rosemary is so condescending it gives me heartburn,” she said to Emily. “She addresses me as if I’m an idiot.”

“It’s just her manner. She talks to me the same way, and we’re not even related.”

“She never talks like that to men. She doesn’t talk that way to Dick or Rich.”

“How many women talk to women and men the same way? Get real.” Emily was riding high because, standing in line at registration, she had met a guy she had a good time with, in and out of bed. She had seen him twice already. Besides, she liked the gang he hung out with better than her old group from the year before. “You hear me on the phone with Mitch. Do I sound like an idiot, or what? I hear my voice going up into baby treble and I hear myself giggling the way I never do, right?”

“I know I talk to Blake just the same as I do with you, Em.”

“Yes, honey, yes, baby, yes, sugar. You don’t
yes
me all the time that way. We’re all a little tainted when we’re with a guy we need to impress with how soft and sweet and sexy we are.”

“Anyhow, I’m ripshit with her. She has no respect for me.”

“She’s your mother. Mothers have no respect. They just have rules.” Emily had got a car finally from her parents, a five-year-old Honda—not what she wanted, but it had wheels and an engine. Last Sunday the girls had gone for a drive, Em and her and Fern and Fern’s new almost-girlfriend, Tammy, from the Ultimate Frisbee team, to the state park and back.

“At least they gave you a car. I couldn’t even get a motorcycle out of Rosemary.”

“This car is just about embarrassing.”

“Yeah, but Em, it goes. We have wheels finally.”

“Training wheels. Even tricycles have wheels.”

“We could trade parents.”

Emily snorted. “No thanks. I may be fed up with mine, but yours are worse. If my mother wrote me the kind of letter Rosemary just sent you, I’d file for divorce. At least my parents don’t ride me. I’m beginning to think that’s cool.”

That evening, Blake wanted to show her the stuff he had been working on, proof, he called it, that King Richard had played fast and loose with campaign finances. Dick was using money he had raised for campaigns to pay for his attempts to get close to powerful members of the Senate. “That’s illegal. That could cause something of a stink.”

“Really? It just seems a technicality. I mean, who could get excited about that? So he’s friendly with guys he sees at work. Big deal.”

“The media. The Senate. They care about technicalities. Paying attention to technicalities keeps them away from the real corruption, the buying of legislation through contributions. That’s legal, but taking money out of the till for any use that could be construed as personal, that’s dirty pool.”

“So what are you going to do with this?” She perched on a chair. She knew better than to pick up anything on his desk. He went ballistic if she touched his computer or his discs or his peripherals. It was one of the least endearing things about him.

“Get it to Roger via Phil. We’ll establish a relationship so we can feed him things.”

She felt a little queasy about what he was planning to do, but frankly it all seemed too esoteric to matter. Besides, her parents had been nasty. They’d arrived without warning, without a polite little phone call saying, Here we come, ready or not. Instead they’d barged in and then Rosemary was furious that she actually had a life. They had been rude to Blake. In fact, they had been rude to her. “You’re going to set things up so you can give information directly to Roger eventually—cutting Phil out of the loop.”

“It’d be simpler that way, unless Phil starts coming up with goodies he
dug up on his own. He’s been useful—but you don’t find him easy to get along with.”

“I don’t. You’ve met his father? Roger?”

Blake nodded. “But we need to establish our reliability first.” He put the materials together and tucked them into his backpack. “We should meet Phil tonight and pass on this stuff.”

“
You
can give it to him.”

“Are you nervous about it? Cold feet?” He took her chin in his hand.

“This is a long way from trying to influence my father, isn’t it? Giving stuff to some reporter who has it in for my dad.”

“This should come from both of us. And this does move you into a position of power—when the time comes, he’ll be more likely to listen. A spot of tiny blackmail. Besides, I thought you were pissed at them.”

It could help her to stir up a tiny fuss, to pull Rosemary’s scrutiny away from her and Blake. Her mother went into a dither whenever Dick was criticized. Rosemary would be mounting a countercampaign and too busy to bother with her. It would prove only a passing nuisance, but her parents’ attention would be elsewhere. Plus she was really angry with them. Phrases from Rosemary’s message kept bobbing up to jab her.

By the next day, she felt she had mulled over her response quite enough. She was not going to wait for Blake to compose an answer. Rosemary was her problem, so she should crank up her courage and deal with her.

She was pleased by her reply. She read it to Emily, and then she sent it, before she lost her moment’s courage to stand up to Rosemary. She had never been good at fighting back. She wasn’t being that courageous. Describing Blake as if he were a casual date was a calumny on their love. It belittled him. But it was a beginning. If she wrote honestly that she loved him, was deeply involved with him, wanted eventually to marry him, then her mother would be up in Middletown tomorrow to drag her out of school and take her home, she was sure of that.

Out of idle curiosity, she told herself, she went online and checked Connecticut’s laws on marriage. She was old enough to marry without parental consent. Not that she was really about to run off with Blake and get hitched, but it made her feel stronger to know that legally she could, that her parents couldn’t stop her. It was a little fantasy she could use to prop up her courage and keep in the back of her mind as a secret weapon against them. Yes, she would wear her blue Tencel dress, her favorite. Or she could wear the bridesmaid’s dress she had dyed black last summer. She’d never had an occasion to wear it since. They were bathed in golden light and a tall, distinguished-looking…what? Would Blake want a rabbi? She had never been to a Jewish wedding. Emily had. She’d ask her what they were like. Blake would be utterly handsome.

She and her parents were engaged in war, and the prize was her identity, her life as she wanted to live it. Merilee was back at George Washington law school for her last year, and Rosemary was again monitoring her social life. Merilee had given in and gone up to Maine. Melissa had not. She was stronger than her golden picture-perfect sister. She suspected that Merilee too wanted more autonomy and that was why she had taken the summer job in New York. Now she was back, and Melissa did not think her older sister would ever truly break free. But she would. No matter what the cost, she would be her own person and free.

A reply from Rosemary was waiting on her e-mail when she got back from class:

Furious, she erased the message, hoping she had been quick enough so that Blake would not read it. It was so insulting, so condescending, so bigoted, she felt smeared with shame as if it were a sticky substance plastering her. How could Rosemary presume to judge Blake at first glance? How superficial could her mother be? It wasn’t superficiality: it was racism, blunt, pervasive and unashamed.

She asked Blake that evening as they were standing in line to see a Czech film, “Did Roger get the material on Dick’s use of contributions?”

“He liked it, but he’s checking into it. I hope he’s preparing an exposé.”

“I hope so,” she said bitterly. “I hope so more than anything else!”

“You’ve been having it out with your mother?”

“I can’t stand them!”

“At least they’re up front about their racism. Maybe that’s easier to deal with than someone who talks the talk and then does what he pleases. You know what you’re dealing with.”

Blake never talked during movies, so it was not until afterward when they stopped for ice cream in the student center that she could ask him, “Have you had fallout from your folks?”

“Not much. They trust me more than your people trust you. And I’m a guy. Parents tend to meddle less with guys.”

“Because you can’t get pregnant?”

“Maybe that’s at the core. Or just that men are expected to see a certain number of females when they’re younger. Si and Nadine are more laid-back with us kids. They’ve always given us a lot of rope. If my grades dipped, they’d sit up, but I have close to a four-point average.”