Black Diamond (15 page)

Everyone understood except Merle. Merle said that she did, but all the time she’d really hoped that Alma would continue; she’d seen her as a star, in the lead role, as the heroine. If she’d known about the family history, she might have fought for her belief and told Alma that the willingness to forsake her talent could well have its beginnings in her conviction that she was not the central character in anything but was, on the contrary, the daughter of a heroine. If you gave dancing lessons to a bunch of clumsy-footed, plain girls who all seemed oddly built and without inborn grace, timing or rhythm, the appearance of a natural champion in their midst was like the arrival of a comet. After one outburst Merle kept quiet, but she couldn’t get over the waste of it.

As for Alma, she did what she’d told everyone, occasionally taking a class and continuing to practice on her own. Every two weeks or so she’d drop in on Merle to have a cup of tea or coffee and to chat. It was a while before she realized that it was her lost career that weighed on Merle’s mind, and not perhaps the loss of revenue that might mean so much: Merle had two teenage boys and a divorced husband who was always ducking out of the alimony. By the time Alma understood that another person – of an age to be her mother – had had great expectations of her, she was too far away from her decision to feel guilty about causing the disappointment.

Twice a year, around Christmas and just before summer, she went with Merle on a weekend expedition to the big city, where they saw the Saturday matinée and evening performances of a ballet. For the whole day she’d live in a world of princesses and sorcerors, enchanted maidens, magical animals and demons.

She began to think of Bruce’s predicament in terms of the stories she’d seen on stage. He too was living under a spell and was unalterably persuaded of the necessity of breaking it. There was a willingness to disbelieve, Alma thought, that could be just as potent a force as the need for faith. Bruce had that. He thought that when he found the real parents, when they were confronted with the outcome of their actions – with the sight of him – they’d disappear. It would be as if they had never been. He would then be like a god: someone who had been brought into the world without the aid of parents. He was willing to waste himself and the whole of his life on his obsession, just as she would waste herself on him.

*

Bruce kept a diary. He’d started it at the age of ten, beginning with descriptions of what had happened during the day, of the food he’d eaten, the clothes people were wearing and the state of the weather. Seasonal phenomena were also noted: ice storms, trees in flower, leaves turning color. That stage didn’t last long. He skipped days, then he began to use the diary for ideas that had occurred to him, stories he’d been told, interesting facts he’d read; and, in the end almost exclusively, for his dreams.

When he was fourteen, he wrote in the diary:

*

Once the number of her dance classes had been cut down, Alma spent more time with Bess. She asked to learn how to cook, to sew and to knit sweaters. Unlike most schools in larger towns, hers had never had a domestic science course. It was taken for granted that girls would be taught all those accomplishments at home and that boys wouldn’t need to know them. The only sewing Alma had ever done was repairwork on her ballet shoes and mending her tights. She’d always bought anything that Bess couldn’t supply. Bess, who took pride in her own domestic skills, hadn’t wanted to interrupt Alma’s life with home chores. She’d thought that Alma could pick up those things when she got married.

For a while the dinner table saw new dishes half-crumbled or partly burned, cakes that looked like sponges and pies that had suffered a cave-in. But Alma was quick to learn. She liked to cook. Soon she was pushing the family to experiment with more exotic foods and flavors. She also enjoyed the evenings when she and Bess sat sewing or knitting and Elton read the papers. Elton could read a paper straight through a conversation, although every once in a while he’d put it down to listen or join in.

Alma used to ask questions about Bess’s early life, about the grandparents and other relatives she’d never met because they’d died while she was still too young to remember anything. Bess had a fund of ghost stories too, which Alma loved to hear her tell again and again. Elton knew only two frightening stories, both supposed to be true: one about a man who was struck by lightning, and the other about a howling dog that gave the clue to who had murdered its owner. Elton was impressed by true stories, or rather, the stories he read in the papers. Sometimes he’d laugh, and announce in the middle of talk, ‘It says here …’ and usually he’d end up by asking, ‘Would you believe it?’ or ‘How about that!’

*

Bruce was the class heart-throb at school. He went out with everybody. The phone never stopped ringing for him. ‘In my day,’ Bess said, ‘we didn’t chase boys. They don’t like it.’

‘They love it,’ Alma told her. ‘They love having a fan club and playing the field. So do girls.’

‘Well, you don’t.’

‘Nope. And just about everyone in my grade thinks there’s something wrong with me.’

‘Nonsense. You’re a nice, old-fashioned girl.’

‘They call it frigid.’

‘I never heard of such a thing. It wouldn’t hurt some of them to get a little frigid for a change. You’ll see – you’ll be glad when the right man comes along and you didn’t throw yourself away.’

Bess didn’t bother to give Bruce advice; neither did Elton. They both suspected the sort of thing he might be doing, and knew that he could handle whatever trouble he got into. He was like a grown man, although he was so young. He was ambitious too, in school and out. He’d learned a lot from working with Elton in the hardware store, then he helped out at the garage they went to. He fixed people’s cars, radios, TVs, clotheswashers – anything. He’d bought an old car from a junkyard and made it practically like new. He was successful in everything. Even the teachers admired him. But his classmates weren’t close to him. If he sometimes led them to believe that they were, his friendliness was merely diplomatic. Nor did his girlfriends touch him at all deeply. He didn’t give himself away emotionally. He didn’t reveal his true mind. He stood aside.

Elton and Bess often felt shy about talking to him. They used to get Alma to ask him questions they wanted answered or to tell him things ‘for his own good’. He’d take anything from Alma.

Alma was now his lieutenant and his right hand, almost his other self. As soon as he’d started to go out with so many girls, she knew that he wasn’t going to be interested in any particular one for long. When his dates called up, she’d answer the phone and pretend to be sympathetic. Even the ones who knew that she and Bruce were adopted assumed her to have nothing but a sisterly interest in him. As for him, he’d said to her that all his dating was unimportant. It was like having an itch and
scratching
it: it made no impression on his feelings or his thought, or anything that made him a person.

She told him that she was glad to hear that, because she didn’t see why she shouldn’t start going out seriously herself. ‘It’s different for a girl,’ he said quickly. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.’

‘You wouldn’t want me to have fun, even though you don’t want me yourself.’

‘That isn’t true,’ he said.

‘You’re never going to want me, are you? It’s worse than being in love with a man who doesn’t like women. In your case, there’s no reason.’

‘I don’t think I’m capable of loving too much anyway. It isn’t in my temperament. Honestly. I don’t understand what people mean by it. And what I think maybe they’ve got in mind – that strikes me as being totally uninteresting and false.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Oh, the usual gooey hearts and flowers stuff.’

‘When you were little, you loved all that kind of thing. You were a very tender-hearted little boy.’

‘Was I? Well, things have changed. What I want, Alma, is for you to be on my side.’

‘Aren’t I always?’

‘You know what we said: about finding our parents.’

‘Oh.’

‘Tracking them down.’

‘I still think –’

‘You promised,’ he reminded her.

She said yes, she’d promised. And she repeated the promise: she’d help him. As soon as they were old enough, he’d said, they’d go to the adoption clinic and find out about their parents. He’d get there first, naturally, and she’d go the next year. They’d swear to help each other find the missing parents – that is, the mothers. The fathers, in Bruce’s opinion, didn’t seem to carry so much blame, even supposing that the women knew who the fathers were.

They’d had a long conversation on the subject about eighteen months before, after she’d refused to see or speak to Bobby Paling. Bruce was the one to answer the phone then. Once Alma
had substituted her two surrogate mothers, Bess and Merle, for the friendship of girls her own age, she’d become isolated from part of school life. Her attitude towards boys had further estranged her from schoolfriends, so for a while – just to have someone as an excuse – she’d gone out with two of the class duds. They’d turned out to be even more desperate for sex than the attractive ones. Her standard defense to suggestive
maneuverings
had always been the reply, ‘Why should I?’ Bobby Paling’s answer to that was, ‘Because I want to.’ He was nervous, skinny and tripped over his own feet, but his approach to the opposite sex was fearless. Outside school his main interests were building model ships and trying to find someone else who had Victorian lead soldiers from the regiments he was missing. After Alma had said that she never wanted to see him again, the girl at the desk to the left of hers told her that, according to the other boys, he also had a huge collection of pornographic magazines.

Bruce thought the episode was funny. He’d lean back in the front-hall chair and murmur into the phone that his sister had happened to mention that very morning how Bobby reminded her of the rear end of a baboon.

‘I thought you’d given that up,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I thought you’d sort of cooled down. Are you really going to try to find out?’

‘You bet I am. Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t think so. Why do you want to?’

‘To hunt them down and pay them back.’

‘What for?’

‘For ruining my life.’

‘But they haven’t done anything to your life.’

That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s just the kind of thing I mean.’

‘I don’t understand it. If someone had done you a wrong, or betrayed you –’

‘What greater wrong could there be? What betrayal could be worse?’

‘It might have been worse for them than for you. Especially now. You’ve got a full life without them. But they’ll always be
wondering about you. At least – maybe not your father. But she would: I’m thinking about your mother.’

‘So am I.’

‘And I don’t think you ought to allow yourself to become so wild about other people and their quarrels. If I were in one of those lawcases people are always pulling on each other, I’d just pay up and get out, no matter how much in the right I was. Otherwise they dominate your thoughts and emotions for years.’

‘So, if somebody attacked you in the street, you’d just drop it, would you?’

‘I didn’t mean that kind of thing. I meant grievances,
arguments
.’

‘Same principle.’

‘Why do you want to throw away your life on something that’s past? It isn’t even your past. It’s theirs.’

‘It’s mine. And it’s mine because of them.’

‘It’s –’

‘It’s no use talking about it.’

‘– like picking a scab.’

‘That’s right. I can’t help it.’

She couldn’t talk to him about it. She didn’t even understand what he meant, though she was glad that he was willing to confide in her. She’d help him, she said, if that was what he wanted. But for herself – she didn’t really think she’d want to know the truth. If she did ever meet her real parents, it would be so much too late for all of them; that was probably why the adoption societies insisted that you had to be legally of age before you could get hold of any information: after a certain point, you were just no longer a child. You’d be more willing to understand. You’d be able to think about things objectively. At least, that would be the general idea. Alma didn’t believe that Bruce was going to change his mind. The plan of somehow getting back at his parents had taken root. It wasn’t going to vanish. It would grow. You could hear a special tone and emphasis in his voice when he talked about it. He thought of it as a quest.