Blessings (22 page)

“I know. This was my other present, this bag. She bought it for me in Paris.”

A large Vuitton bag stood on the floor at the girl’s feet. “I know it’s nice, but I didn’t really want it.”

Paris. Vuitton. The girl—she must stop saying, even mentally, “the girl”—wore a good bracelet watch and tiny diamond studs in her ears, things that Jennie had never had for herself and never could have given.

But some comment was expected. “It’s a good size. You can even carry a couple of books in it.”

“Oh, I use it, even on campus sometimes. We have a nice campus for a college in the city. You should see it. Have you ever?”

“No,” Jennie said. I was there this afternoon, hoping to see you. Hoping not to see you.

“Well, you should sometime.”

We circle, spiraling idiotically through trivia, coming fearfully closer and closer to the center where the knife lies.

Jill opened her mouth and closed it, then opened it again. “Just a while before I graduated from high school, that’s when Mother gave me your letter.”

“My letter?”

“The one you wrote before I was born, that was in the box of baby clothes.”

“That one. Oh, yes.”

Actually she had forgotten. It was true, then, that you could really block out anything you wanted to, anything that hurt too much to be remembered.

“We were alone in the house one afternoon. She sat with me and waited while I read it. We both cried.”

“I can’t remember what I wrote.”

“Do you want me to tell you? I know it by heart.”

Jennie put up her hand. “Oh, no! Please, no.”

I will not let myself be torn to pieces. Now that she has told me this much, I will have to keep seeing them, her and the woman who is her mother… . On a porch, she said. Bare mountains. Red mesas. Is Albuquerque on a mesa? Wind chimes tinkle. Cactus grows on the lawn. There’s a swing on the porch, with the two of them in it, and the woman’s arms around the girl’s shoulders; I see she has a thoughtful face, the face of an intellectual, with a gray streak in her dark hair. I don’t know why I see her like that.

“That was the day I first knew I absolutely had to find you,” Jill said.

“Not before then?”

“Not really. But once the idea came, it stayed with me all the time. I knew I had to know where I came from.”

“And your … parents?”

“Whether they minded? Not at all. They understood.” Jill paused. “My red hair … I looked so conspicuous among the others in my family. If you know what I mean.”

That glorious hair. Poor soul, wondering where it came from.

“You have your father’s hair,” Jennie said. And she, too, paused. “It ran in that family. Maybe you look a little like them. … I didn’t know them well.” Then she blurted out, “It’s painful for me to talk about them.”

“You don’t need to. Just tell me about yourself.”

“Tell about myself?” Jennie repeated, feeling a bitterness. “A lifetime in an evening?”

“There’ll be other evenings, Jennie. Do you mind if I call you that? I wouldn’t feel right calling two people Mother.”

“I don’t mind.”

To tell the truth, it seems absurd to call me Mother. I haven’t been a mother. And “other evenings,” she says. It’s only to be expected. Once having taken the first step, others must follow; one doesn’t just stop in place. So the road extends, with no imaginable end, except possibly a stone wall for me. She waits now for my history. Her ankles are crossed, the posture seemingly demure, yet already I know that this girl—Jill—is not demure. But then, neither am I.

“You came from Baltimore, you said.”

“My parents were poor Jews from Europe, survivors of the death camps. We had very little, but it was a good home. My father’s dead, my mother lives in Florida, I have no brothers or sisters—” She choked and stopped.

Crazy, this is, we two here, having this conversation, all of it surreal like Dali’s melting clocks and dream vistas, distant houses, lost time. And I, reluctant, as if on a doctor’s couch, awakening blurred memories, long ago put away to sleep.

“Excuse me,” Jennie said, wiping tears. “I don’t usually cry.”

“Why don’t you? There’s nothing wrong with crying.”

“Once I start, I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop.”

She’s strong, this girl, sensible, in charge. She leads tonight, and I follow. I’m not used to that.

Jennie made a lump out of the wet handkerchief and straightened herself again in the chair, saying almost timidly, “I’m not sure how to go on.”

The response was a quiet one but prompt. “I suppose —I wish—you could tell me why you haven’t wanted to see me, why you’ve resisted for all these weeks. I didn’t want to force you by coming here like this, but there wasn’t any other way.”

“It was—” Jennie said, stumbling. “I mean, it’s impossible to face, to be reminded—”

She backs me into a corner. In a courtroom I can thrust and parry; I haven’t been trapped there yet. But this girl is not going to let me go. And now she’s in my mind to stay, so that I’ll never forget her. I’ll see her face forever and hear her voice. She speaks well, good diction is so important, young people all seem to slur these days, they speak so badly… . And she sits with grace, tall in the chair. She’d fit into Peter’s family… . And isn’t that ironic? Oh, the pain in my head won’t stop.

At that moment Jill said, “I wanted so much to fit into your life, to be a part of it.”

Jennie gasped. “How can that be? It’s so late. Too late for us. You don’t—I mean, we don’t fit into each other’s lives.”

“No, you were right the first time. You could fit into mine. You just don’t want me in yours. You said so to the people who called you.”

“I didn’t say it like that.”

How cruel, how stupid of them to have told her that way! And yet I did say it, didn’t I? I said they should leave me alone. Look at her… . Her skin is like milk, and the blue veins at the temples, where the hair falls away, are so thin, her lifeblood flows in them… . Now she’s grieving, she’s hurt. … I was right from the beginning. It was better for neither of us to know the other, ever.

And Jennie spoke very softly. “I only meant, it’s hard —yes, I said impossible—to have any relationship after nineteen years. That’s all I meant.”

“We could try. We can try right now to communicate.” Jill looked at her watch. “It’s only nine. You could tell me a lot in the next hour or two. If you wanted to,” she finished.

Jennie sighed. “I’ll do better. I’ll sketch a family tree and send it to you. I’ll write some anecdotes, all that I know about my side. As to the other—his—I can’t tell you much. I knew nothing except the very little he told me, that they were Southerners—you might call them Jewish aristocrats, I suppose. I don’t know any more.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve already talked with Peter, and he’s told me.”

Jennie stared. “You … you what?”

Jill stared back. “I found him, the same as I found you. We’ve had long conversations by telephone these last few weeks. He’s in Chicago, and he’s asked me to fly out there next weekend. He was so excited when the committee people called him! He wanted to get in touch with me that same day.”

Dumbfounded, Jennie could only let the words pour over her like ice water.

“We have a lot in common.” The girl’s voice, rising, held triumph. “He’s an archaeologist. You didn’t know that, did you? He’s a professor. And I went on a dig once in Israel, so we had a lot to talk about. He sounds like a wonderful person. I can’t wait to see him.”

After shock, thoughts flowed, and Jennie began to see more clearly the young person who sat opposite. An extraordinarily determined young person, she was, and clever, too, keeping back the business about Peter until she had heard first what Jennie had to tell her.

And she said carefully, “I’m glad for you, Jill. And for him, too, if this is what you want. I hope good comes of it.”

“Why shouldn’t good come of it?”

“I don’t know, exactly, because I don’t know anything about him. I only know that a life can have many complications—”

“Like your life?” Jill’s eyes, demanding, met Jennie’s and held.

This time Jennie’s held too. “Yes. Like mine.”

“But you won’t tell me what yours are.”

“No. My complications are my own.”

The momentary, following silence threatened Jennie, and she opened her lips to break it. But Jill spoke first.

“He wants to see you.”

Jennie started. “Who? Peter? Wants to see me?”

“Yes, he says now that I’ve made the move, it would be a good thing for us all. He’s coming to New York during the semester break.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no! You’re not going to do this to me, either of you.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to prevent it. He wants to, he told me so.”

“I won’t have it, do you hear?” Jennie cried out furiously. “I simply won’t have this outrage!”

Netted and caught. Peter again, summoned back from the dead. In the next room the clothes for a honeymoon are spread on the bed. The impostor’s honeymoon … Jay … oh, my dear, my dear, am I going to lose you? Oh, I’m determined not to, and yet I know I will. I see the writing on the wall. I see it.

“What are you people trying to do to me?” she screamed.

Jill picked the Vuitton bag from the floor and stood up. Her eyes were filled with tears, but she spoke coldly.

“You’re not at all what I hoped for. I never thought you would be like this.”

Jennie stood too. “What did you think I would be like?”

“I don’t know, but not like this.”

Tense, taut, trembling, the two confronted each other.

“Yes,” Jill said bitterly, “I do know. I thought at least— at least you would kiss me.”

And Jennie wept. Grief burst open in her throat. “Oh,” she said incoherently, “you come here like this … so that I can’t even believe what I’m seeing … nineteen years. I open the door. And now he too … I can’t think straight. … Of course I’ll kiss you.”

Jill drew back. “No. Not that way. Not if I have to ask for it.”

The tears ran over and, unwiped, slid down her cheeks. She opened the door and ran out into the hall.

“Wait!” Jennie called. “You mustn’t go like that! Oh, please—”

But the girl was gone. Her quick steps clattered on the stairs; the outer door thumped shut and echoed through the house. For a long minute Jennie stood hearing the echo, then turned back into the apartment and sat down with her hands over her face.

The first immediate sense of unreality returned. This couldn’t have happened. Yet the girl’s lipstick was there on the floor as proof of her presence. It had rolled out of her purse most probably, when at the start of tears she had reached for a tissue. Jennie picked it up: Marcella Borghese, Rimini Rose Frost. She let it lie on her palm. It grew warm, lying there so long, while she thought of the girl’s smile, her angry, beautiful eyes, and her tears.

“I read the letter that came with the baby clothes …”

A child looking for her mother. Poor child.

But she has a mother, has always had a good one. Why me, now?

You know why. Don’t ask.

Poor child.

But they will ruin everything, she and Peter. Peter coming back from the dead.

How can I ever keep the two of them separate from Jay? How dare he, how dare the two of them do this to me?

After a long time Jennie got up, turned the lamp off, and took a Valium from the medicine cabinet. Only once in her life, under stress of root-canal surgery and an infection, had she taken a tranquilizer. Tonight, though, she would have swallowed anything that could dull the confusion and despair.

In the morning her mind felt clearer. “The important thing always,” she reminded herself aloud as she sat in the little kitchen having coffee, “is to keep one’s head.”

But Jill had gone crying, and gone like that across the city in the dark. Surely amends must be made! I don’t remember exactly what I said, Jennie thought. I only know I was beside myself. Something had to be done, though. A sensible, quiet talk. We could go someplace for lunch and I could explain things better. We’d both be less emotional a second time, I think.

She was reaching for the telephone book when the telephone rang.

“Good morning,” Jay said. Amazing man, he was one of those people who are cheerful and vigorous when they wake up. “A miracle! My fever’s gone, I feel fine, and how would you like to have a Sunday jog in the park? The kids are with the grandparents all day.”

She thought quickly. “Oh, darling, I thought you were sick and I made other plans.”

“Oh, hell, what other plans?”

“I … there’s some friend of my mother’s in town from Miami. I have to take her to a museum or something. We’re supposed to have lunch.”

“Well, I could put up with that. I’ll take you both to lunch.”

“She’s an old lady, Jay, you’d hate it.”

“What makes you think I hate old ladies? Listen, you’ll be an old lady someday, and I don’t expect to hate you.”

“Honestly, it would be awful for you. As a matter of fact, there are two of them, and one of them has a husband. They’re nice, but they’re really very boring people.”

“You meet plenty of boring people when you practice law. I’m used to them.”

“Yes, but why should you suffer on a Sunday? Besides, you had a fever last night and you’re supposed to stay indoors for a day afterward at least.”

“I’m actually being rejected,” he complained in mock sorrow.

“Yes, for today you are. Go on back and relax with the paper. I’ll call you later.”

She hung up. Lies and subterfuge already. I hate myself for it. That’s what comes of lies. They beget more lies.

Nevertheless she dialed the Barnard number. Now, waiting for Jill to come to the phone, she had a recollection of dormitory smells—sweet talcum powder and the sharp odor of cleaning fluid—of dormitory noises, rock music, ringing phones, and high heels rapping; she saw Jill hurrying down the corridor, the hair lifting from her shoulders as she ran, anticipating a call from some young man, or perhaps from home.

“Jill,” she said, “this is Jennie.”

“Yes?” The tone was cool.

Say it boldly. “I was concerned about last night, about whether you got back all right.”

“I got back all right.”