A Gesture Life (33 page)

Now of course I fear darker chance lies ahead for her and Thomas if I don’t soon retract myself from their lives, that something terrible and final will befall them as did Anne Hickey, smash them without any sign of admonition. Even the thought of this makes my heart leap and hurdle, and I can say once and for all that if a guarantor came forward and promised their lives would be good and full and only sporadically miserable in exchange for mine, I’d tie a twenty-five-pound bag of driveway salt onto each of my wrists and ankles and fall one last time into the pool. One might argue that this would be no sacrifice to me at all, and yet I must confess as well to a strangely timed current of happiness, despite what traumas have just occurred and are occurring, and say that I have never before quite felt the kind of modest, pure joy that comes from something like simply holding Thomas’s hand as he
leads us through some mall, or watching as he and Sunny orchestrate the pulling of a T-shirt over his head, his sturdy little arms stuck for a moment, wiggling with half-panic and half-delight. And it’s not just these sightings, of course, that elevate me, but the naturally attendant hope of a familial continuation, an unpredictable, richly evolving
to be.
For what else but this sort of complication will prove my actually having been here, or there? What else will mark me, besides the never-to-be-known annals of the rest?

There’s a knock at the door and to my great surprise it’s Sunny, holding a white paper bag of deli sandwiches and a cardboard tray with two cups of tea. It’s a little lunch for us, she says, stepping inside the cramped space. There’s only one other chair for her to sit in, and she sits in it, across Renny’s desk from me. She’s neatly dressed again, in business clothes, though I know she’s already stopped going to work at the mall.

“The nurse said I could find you here. I kept calling the house but no one ever picked up. I was starting to get worried. You ought to get an answering machine, you know.”

“I often mean to, but I never do,” I say. “I like to answer the phone in person, as I always did at the shop. Where is Thomas?”

“I left him with the neighbor.”

“He didn’t want to come along?”

“Of course he did,” she says. “But I think he’s a little frightened of hospitals. Like his mother, I guess.”

“You?” I say, accepting one of the turkey sandwiches from the deli I used to frequent. “You never told me this. All the times I brought us here when you were younger, while I was doing business, and you never let on.”

“That’s why I didn’t like being around the store, either,” she answers, almost smiling. “All those depressing devices. Before I came to you they had me in a place like this, but much worse, of course. I know they told you I was at a Christian orphanage, but really it was like a halfway house, I guess. I wasn’t put up for adoption. I was abandoned. I can’t believe you’re surprised. Did you really believe they would give you a wanted child?”

I answer, “They said I would be an ideal candidate, if it weren’t for the fact I wasn’t married. But they were convinced of my intentions, and so sent you to me anyway.”

But I feel myself addressing her in the lawyerly and justifying way I always employed when she was growing up, and I am quite sure I should stop speaking now, or at least speaking like this, and I suddenly say, “You probably wish you had never had to come live with me.”

Sunny looks down, slowly unwrapping the white butcher paper from her sandwich. Her short dark hair is combed back neatly, away from her temples and eyes, the soft, maturing shape of her ever-beautiful face.

She says, “I don’t wish that anymore. I used to. And I used to wish I had never been born. But all that’s natural, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Right. But with you, I just didn’t understand. I thought this even when I was very young, why you would ever want a child, me or anyone else. You seemed to prefer being alone, in the house you so carefully set up, your yard and your pool. You could have married someone nice, like Mary Burns. You could have had an instant, solid family, in your fine neighborhood, in your fine town. But you didn’t. You just had me. And I always wondered why. I
always thought it was
you
who wished I had never come, that you had never chosen to send for me.”

“I never once thought that,” I tell her, “not for one moment.”

“It doesn’t matter if you did,” she says, with a gentle equanimity. “We’re here, aren’t we? Whatever has happened.”

I let the notion suspend, and even happily, for I’ve long wished to taste the plain and decent flavor of being with someone who is likewise content to be with me. It’s a feeling not necessarily happy or thrilling or joyful but roundly pleasing, one that I am sure most people in the world know well, and others, like Sunny and me, both orphans of a sort, must slowly discover, come to learn for ourselves.

“How is Renny, by the way? Was he awake?”

“He was,” Sunny replies. “We talked for a little while. He was very tired, and I wanted to leave him alone, but he kept asking me questions.”

“About what?”

“Guess.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose Renny was curious about you being my daughter.”

She carefully peels the tops from the cups of tea. She hands me one. “I think he knows you adopted me. But he wasn’t so interested in that. He wanted to know what it was like, having you as a father. Growing up together in the house.”

I tell her, “You don’t have to tell me what you said to him. I don’t mind.”

“How are you so sure you don’t want to hear it?” she answers. “You think I would say something bad?”

“No, I don’t,” I say, trying not to sound pleading. “It’s just that I see no reason to put you in a funny position now, when it was
probably awkward enough with Renny. I know this will sound terrible, given what’s happened in the last few days, but I’m almost grateful for the way things have gone of late, by which I mean between you and Thomas and me. It’s certainly strange and unexplainable, but I can’t think of another time in my life that I have been as hopeful as I am now, and I am sure it is because you have come back here with your son. I will take that over everything else. So you see how you could have told Renny whatever you wished or felt compelled to, and it would be all right with me. With the misery that has come, there is some fortune. Perhaps even for me.”

Sunny says, “You’re not someone I ever think has had too little fortune in his life.”

I don’t answer, though I glance at her somberly, to try to tell her somehow that she’s both absolutely wrong, and right.

“I think that’s why Renny likes you so much,” she speaks up. “You’re a charm to him. He looks up to you. He’s obviously a nice man, too, and I could never tell him anything bad about you.”

“But you very well could.”

“I could,” she tells me straight, but without any malice in her eyes. “I could. I guess I could have told him a thousand things about you and about me, none of them alone so terrible and damning but taken altogether.”

“But there is that one thing….”

She lowers her eyes.

“I’ve been wishing it never happened.”

“Yes,” she very firmly and quietly says. “But we’ve talked about that already, haven’t we? I don’t want to bring it up again. Please.”

“Okay,” I say to her, though somehow I feel an impulse to lead us to some brink. So I say, “But in fact everything with Dr. Anastasia was all my fault. It was.”

Sunny doesn’t answer. There’s a cross wrinkle in her brow, but she somehow sloughs off my likely ruinous charge and asks instead if the turkey sandwich is all right for me. I can only answer that it is. Before I know it we’re on to something else entirely, namely, her round of interviews in Connecticut, and while she’s telling me how it doesn’t look promising that she’ll get the job or really want it if she does (the store being somewhere in northern Arizona), I see how far past those events and times my daughter is, how (whether psychologically healthful or not) she’s for the present moment put it well away, just a box in a trunk in an upstairs garret closet, this for her sake and Thomas’s and maybe even for mine.

We finish up with lunch and drink our tepid tea. We don’t say much of anything more, except to laugh about Thomas a little bit, as she tells me of his renewed love for all things on dry land. When she leaves I decide to go out of the hospital with her and escort her to her car, which she lets me do without a word. And I think a simple thought, that we can walk like this across wide parking lots, we can have a lunch together in a tiny basement room, and leave off mostly decent and all right.

I’m heartened on my own drive home, and yet I can’t seem to shake what I thought I had put well past me. For it was not in the hospital but in an affiliated clinic that I had arranged for Sunny to take care of her difficulty. She had returned once more to the house, after having been away for nearly a year. She was barely eighteen years old. She had been living with her friend Lincoln in a tenement apartment somewhere in Upper Manhattan. One evening as I was reading in bed the telephone rang and it was Sunny on the line. Her voice was very quiet and shallow, and for a few seconds I thought it was someone else, a prank caller of some kind. But then it was unmistakably Sunny, the reserve of her coming through
even the anxiousness in her voice. Of course she would not say a word of how scared she was. But I listened and did not try to interrupt, and by the end of the conversation I told her I was glad that she decided not to go to one of the crowded, dirty clinics where she was living, and that she had nothing to be concerned with anymore. When I awoke I made several discreet contacts and by the afternoon the procedure was arranged and scheduled for the following Monday. Sunny would take the train up to Bedley Run on Sunday and I would meet her at the station and take us to the private clinic for an examination, which the doctor insisted upon before any procedure the next morning.

When I saw her step out onto the platform I was taken aback by the broad, curving shape of her. Her face was full. She hadn’t said how far the pregnancy had gone, and I had assumed it was but a few weeks past her date, perhaps a month or two, no more. Anyone else would have thought that she was too long with the child, that it was much too late, that there was nothing left to do. She was indeed quite near full-term. But when she came out of the train the first thought that came to me was that it was a Sunday and quiet, when there was hardly anyone about, and that I ought to spirit her to the private clinic and to Dr. Anastasia as quickly as possible.

In the car I didn’t speak. What was there to say? If anything, I had only criticisms, and though I chose not to air them I was feeling edgy all the same, driving brusquely, speeding and changing lanes without signaling. Sunny didn’t seem to notice, swaying on each turn, unseatbelted as always, and suddenly I was furious with her. How could she get herself into such a predicament? How long did she believe she could delay? Where now was her “lover,” whom she always talked of being so genuine and serious and gentle? Perhaps he had made a few recordings some time ago, but did he even own his
trumpet anymore, or was it pawned for a few weeks’ phantom pleasure and delirium? And glancing over at her I felt my fury redouble, seeing that she had little need to apologize or excuse or otherwise explain, and I thought—darkly, for a bare millisecond—that I could unbuckle myself now, too, and let the car’s momentum carry us straight through the approaching sharp turn, into the stone farmer’s wall that bounded the old suburban roadway. I wanted an end to us, inglorious and swift, just another unfortunate accident on Route 9, to leave a few lines hardly noticed in the local paper concerning a longtime Bedley Run resident and his daughter, with no survivors.

And yet what did I do but nothing unusual, save elicit a sighing murmur from the tires as I wheeled us wickedly around that bend, the same one that I would grimly consider on countless future occasions, and that one rainy night years later my friend Anne Hickey would not survive. If only once I could cease imagining the various motions, and instead of conjurings and dummy musings that leave one subtly affected, take hold of some moment and fully acquit myself to it, whether decently or ignobly. This is not to say I wish I had smashed us into the wall, but that I might have at least stopped the car along the road and turned squarely and given her every last angry bit and piece of my mind. But what happened of course was that I drove home and let her inside the house where we separated until the appointed exam, Sunny upstairs in her old room stripped of everything but the bed, and I down in the family room, listening to the records of Chopin and Mozart I had bought for her to use as models and inspiration. And while I listened to those stirring, ambling notes I might have realized how frightening all this was to her, how overwhelming and awful, but I sensed instead only the imminent disgrace and embarrassment that would hang about the house like banners of our mutual failure.

At six o’clock I went up and had to rouse her. Her eyes were puffed and red; perhaps she had fallen asleep crying. I told her to come down to the car, and she said weakly she didn’t want to go to the doctor that night, asking if I could take her the next day. I reminded her that it was the waiting that had placed her in such trouble, that it was only an examination and she could talk to Dr. Anastasia about whatever she wished. Then she said she wasn’t sure anymore about going ahead. I didn’t protest; I only repeated that it was an examination and that nothing was yet determined. She finally nodded, still groggy, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. I fully noticed then the change in her as she walked down the upstairs hall, the outwardness of her feet, the slightest waddle to her gait. To remember that now makes me feel the way I should have felt, to brim at such a sight with sober pride and happiness, a grandparental glow, though then it was, I must recall, a most sickening vision to me, being the clearest picture of my defeats, familial and otherwise.

We arrived at the clinic well after dark, a few minutes before Dr. Anastasia. We waited in silence. When he drove up he got out of his car quickly and went straight to the doors, his keys out. He nodded at us and let us in and locked the doors behind us. I’d known him only casually; he was one of many obstetricians with privileges at the county hospital, but the only one I knew of who also worked at such a clinic. He was older than I, and not originally from this country, and he always seemed utterly purposeful and competent if not always warm, the sort of professional one could admire for his straightforward nature and his efficiency. I believe he sensed my appreciation and so obliged my request for an after-hours appointment. But when we were gathered in the brightly lighted waiting room, he looked somewhat put out, disturbed. I
didn’t offer anything and then he asked Sunny if she was ready to be examined. They went into the next room. After a mere five minutes Sunny came out, and Dr. Anastasia called me in. Sunny walked past me and sat on the waiting room sofa.