A Gate at the Stairs (12 page)

“Well, the birth mother you’ll meet today—everyone on a first-name basis only. She needs to interview you and see if you are the right parents—right mother—in her mind. The birth father, well, we don’t know much. And there are privacy issues. She didn’t know him well. It was, I think, only a fling, of sorts. Possibly it was a—no, I take it back. I don’t think it was a date rape.”

A dry quiet descended on the room like snow.

Finally someone stirred stiffly, as if shucking off ice. Sarah. “Can we meet the baby?” she asked.

Roberta grinned. “You’ve come all this way. Of course! But first you need to meet Bonnie. The birth mother.” And here she lowered her voice. “She’s just going to ask you a few questions. Her concern is religion. The baby’s already baptized, but Bonnie wants a promise that she’ll be confirmed.” And here Roberta lowered her head and her esses made a hiss:
“Unenforcable, of course.”
She then resumed a normal tone and what seemed to me an attorneylike posture. Broom up the back. “You wouldn’t have any problem with that, would you?”

“I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “I have attended the Unitarian Church and often there they have ceremonies that—”

Roberta did not like the word
Unitarian
. She interrupted with an ominous richness of voice. “This is a birth mother who spends her Saturday nights ice-skating with nuns. You wouldn’t have any problem with having the child confirmed
and
taking First Communion in a Catholic church.”

“Uh, no, I wouldn’t,” said Sarah, on cue.

“Good.” Roberta stood. “Now let’s meet Bonnie.” She opened the door to her office and signaled to someone inside. “We’re ready for you,” she said quietly, and then opened the door wide.

Bonnie was not bonnie. She was dressed formally, in a beige knit suit, pantyhose, and brown flat shoes, to make her look professional, I supposed, which she wasn’t but wanted someday to be. She was heavy, perhaps still from the pregnancy. Her hair was thick and pale, the color of a wax bean, with roots of darker doorknocker blond. She was older than I was. Maybe she was even thirty. She wore glasses, and behind them I could see her eyebrows were shaved into a thin line—the stubble showing both above and below. The thin line was lengthened at the end with an eyebrow pencil, which looked about as natural as if she had just taped the pencils themselves over her eyes. I had always been told never to pluck above the brow, only below but never above, and never, ever shave them, and seeing her standing there, in the muck of her mistake, I finally knew why people had said all that stuff about plucking. I stood to greet her. She looked puffy and medicated. I wondered how it would be for her going back to school, inconveniently carrying around this ironic name—like the birth father, Victor. I wondered if she thought it mocked her. When everything else in her life probably was a source of sorrow, on the other hand, why would she care about the rhetorical mockery of her name?

She walked toward us slowly, with the fibrous, brushing sound of pantyhose, and then she sat down on the sofa next to me, so I sat back down with her. Beneath her stiff composure and mask of a face she gave off a whiff of bacon grease and gum. The smell of spearmint grew, and I began to wonder whether she had a wad stashed in the back of her mouth to disguise a terrified breath. Close up the odd art of her eyebrows seemed more a mild madness than a mere miscalculation.

I smiled at her, thinking she could see me in her peripheral vision—and she could. She turned and nodded but then focused her attention back on Sarah, who sat across from us.

“Have you met my daughter yet?” she asked Sarah.

All the words in that question felt wrong. There was an awkward pause, and Roberta jumped up. “I’m going to have Suzanne bring us some coffee.” She got up and went looking for Suzanne, who for some reason had left her receptionist’s desk and gone into Roberta’s office, as if they had traded places and it didn’t really matter who was who. That of course was what this whole adoption agency was about: women switching places.

“No, I’ve only seen pictures,” said Sarah. “She looks very beautiful.”

“Yes,” said Bonnie, her eyes suddenly welling. “She is.”

“She looks like a little Irish Rose,” said Roberta, overhearing as she returned to the room, carrying a tray with two bowls: one piled with creamers and one jammed with yellow packets of sweetener that I’d learned from friends had been invented accidentally by chemists during a reformulation of insecticide. Death and dessert, sweetness and doom, lay side by side: I was coming to see that this was not uncommon. Such sugar, of course, was corrupt. Death, on the other hand, was pretty straightforward. I knew several kids who for money had been lab rats in pharmaceutical experiments, and they had secretly mucked up the data by doing things like eating doughnuts on the sly or getting high on glue. But after their blood was tested or their sleep observed, the results were sent out as science.

“I don’t really believe in interracial relationships,” said Bonnie, looking in a kind of dead-faced way at Sarah.

“The whole
tragic mulatto
thing?” said Sarah with a light, fluffy sarcasm that had flown in from some other conversation entirely. “The whole
what about the children
thing?”

“What?” Bonnie contorted her face as if in pain. She wanted to be respected for the gift she was giving the world and in this room she wanted to be in charge, but now it seemed clear she probably wasn’t.

Roberta glared at Sarah. “Sorry,” said Sarah. Something gentler returned to her voice. “Sometimes other people’s cell phone conversations come in on my fillings.” She grinned.

“Really?” asked Bonnie, confused.

“Actually, that happens to me sometimes,” I chimed in. “I swear to God. It’s very weird.”

Sarah tried to make her way back to Bonnie, whom she’d lost. “But, Bonnie, I just wanted to ask you: Isn’t the baby half African-American?” Sarah recrossed her legs. She had winced a little at Roberta’s “little Irish Rose.” I could see she was torn between not wanting to seem confrontational and wanting to know just what kind of racism was here in this room.

“More like a quarter, I think. I don’t know. He—my daughter’s father—once asked me what I would think of having a child who had one black grandparent.”

This did not sound like date-rape chat, or like fling chat. Or chat, really, of any sort at all. But perhaps I was learning a thing or two about chat. Where was Suzanne with the coffee?

“Maybe he was Italian,” said Bonnie.

No one laughed, which was excellent. No one laughed out loud.

Suzanne at last came in with coffeepot and cups, and just as she was pouring and passing around the coffee the outside door cracked open. “Is this—” said a man’s voice. “Oh, yes, I see it is,” and the door opened wide. In stepped a distinguished-looking man: he had a balding head with pewter-hued hair grown long and wavy in the back; it was like he was wearing a head cape. His salt-and-pepper mustache was clipped neatly.

“Edward!” Sarah jumped up.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. His gaze, which had been on her, turned to his own paper cup of coffee, which he sipped from, as if it were not just delicious but urgent, and I could see he was showing us himself, his aquiline profile, his handsome objectness, so that for a minute he did not have to trouble himself to admire us but to soak up our appreciation of him. He had snapped in two the connecting gaze he’d quickly made, then unmade, with Sarah, but one could see it was his habit to almost imperceptibly dominate and insult.

Instead of being angry, Sarah looked happier than I had ever seen her in my brief acquaintance with her. Something in her face softened and relaxed, and a youthful light went on behind every part of it. Despite everything, she was in love with him. I had not seen love very much, and it was hard for my midwestern girl’s mind to imagine being in love with a guy this flamboyantly self-involved and, well, old. He could have been fifty or even fifty-four. But Sarah went over to him, clasped his face in her hands, and smooched him on the lips. He patted her on the back as if to calm her down. His deep eyes, his charming smile—I could not then and there see any of it. This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to understand its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

“The cab headed out of the airport and got halfway to Pulaski,” Edward was saying, “before the driver realized he was headed in the wrong direction.”

“Here we say ‘Plasky,’” Roberta said quickly.

“Came back through something called Allouez—how do you say that?”

Many of the original French traders seemed to have had such an adversarial relationship to nature, especially water, that everything they named took on their gloom: Death’s Door, Waves’ Grave, or Devil’s Lake, all lovely vacation spots translated from the French. Even in Delton County “the lake of God,”
du Dieu
, was known by the locals as Lake Doo-doo. By comparison, “Allouez” seemed welcoming, though perhaps sarcastic.

“Alwez,” she said, as if it weren’t French at all.

“Edward Thornwood,” he said, thrusting out his hand at her.

“Edward. Edward. Yes. Edward. I’m Roberta,” she said, clearly trying to emphasize that this was a first-name-only situation. Could the revelation of his last name be a deal-breaker? Would the birth mother in a change of heart later remember it, track him down, take her baby back? I tried to live cautiously—or eventually learned to try to live—in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret—operatic, oceanic, fathomless—seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.

Sarah introduced Edward to everyone again, once more as just “Edward,” perhaps to help erase the memory of his uttered last name, and he focused his bright gaze and kind words—
so wonderful to meet you, I know this is a complicated time
—on me. This caused visible consternation in Bonnie, who began to look even sadder and more distant, for it was clear Edward thought I was the birth mother and that I was the one who needed to be charmed. Bonnie desired and required the focus of this meeting, if not this entire day, to be on her. Could she not be the star even for that long, just once, given everything, giving everything away as she was doing?

“Edward, Bonnie here is the birth mother,” said Sarah.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, nodding toward her but failing to summon the same energy he had had for me. I wondered if being mistaken twice now for a possible mother portended something not so sparkling for my future.

“Care for some more coffee?” asked Suzanne. She lifted the pot and toasted his cup with it.

“No, thanks,” he said. And then we all chatted some more. Edward was a researcher—no longer associated with a university. He did research on eye cancer.

“How did you get interested in eyes?” asked Roberta brightly.

“Well,” said Edward, seated on the loveseat with Sarah. He gave a look of innocent, empirical glee. “At first I was interested in breasts.”

“How very unusual,” said Roberta.

I let out a small amused hoot—a mistake.

Bonnie simply stared at him.

“But there is a kind of eye cancer in mice that benefits greatly from a chemical that’s in grapes and red wine, actually—it’s called resveratrol—and I got interested in that. Of course no big pharmaceutical company is interested because it’s a natural product and not patentable, and the big companies control the research grants—”

“But you have some outside interest,” said Roberta to the rescue. These birth mothers wanted rich, rich, rich. They wanted to know their babies would have all the things they hadn’t. And the babies would. They were cute; they would be fine. The person who most needed adopting, it seemed to me, was Bonnie.

“Oh, yes. There’s some interest,” he added quickly. He could take a lawyer’s cues as quickly as Sarah. “But it’s not like I’ve invented a killer robot or anything as glamorous as that.” There was silence, so he continued. “Unfortunately, artificial intelligence is very artificial. In my opinion.”

Sarah piped up awkwardly. “Here we are with my professional kitchen and his lab and despite all that chemistry our bodies could never get anything cooked up between us.” There it was again: adopted kid as default kid. In nervous ingratiation Sarah had crossed some line—of privacy and sensitivity, perhaps even of honesty—though I didn’t know it then. Edward gave her a sharp look. Nonetheless, Sarah continued. “Not a green thumb in the house,” she said. “Even invasive species won’t grow in my garden. I have the shyest vinca in the world.”

What did it mean to have the shyest vinca in the world? It seemed sad but perhaps necessary, like the retirement of an aged ballerina.

Bonnie began to shift in her seat and even her expressionlessness began to recede into the distance so that yet greater expressionlessness could take its place.

“Bonnie, do you have any questions?”

Then the sudden attention to her, which she had earlier seemed to want, startled her. Her face went red with heat. Perhaps there was in fact a chemical found in nature that could prevent eye cancer, cancer of the tear ducts, though I doubted it. I could see her eyes start to redden as well, and soon bright water was shining across them like sunlight with no sun. Her hands moved slowly to her hair. The full force of what she was doing was slowly coming to her once again.

“I am only a hospital aide right now.” She did not say the word
bedpan
, but she didn’t have to. “I would like to go back to school.”

“We can help you with that,” said Sarah.

“Uh, actually, that’s not allowed in this state,” said Roberta. “But certain smaller gifts might be.”

“I mean, we could help—in other ways. Advice and things.” Sarah was both pathetic and game. You had to hand it to her.

“I just want the best for my little girl,” Bonnie said firmly. “Will you raise her Catholic?”