Blessings (23 page)

“I’m sorry that my being upset was so hard on you. I thought maybe you and I could have a talk and clarify things a little. Would you do that?”

“Well …” Now the tone was cautious. “When?”

“Today. Lunch, I thought. Around one o’clock.” She decided quickly; best to make it downtown on the West Side, someplace where none of Jay’s friends, most of whom lived on the Upper East Side, would be apt to go strolling on a Sunday. “The Hilton on Sixth Avenue at Fifty-third Street. It’s nice there, they don’t rush you. Shall I meet you at the registration desk?”

“I’ll be there.”

“And, Jill … it’ll be easier for us both this time.”

“I hope so.” A hesitation. “I’m glad you called, Jennie.”

We’ll talk things over calmly and work them out, Jennie said to herself. She’s old enough, and surely she’s smart enough to understand that people have differing circumstances, that you have to make allowances for one another.

Jennie’s spirits were still sanguine as she waited in the lobby of the great hotel. She had always been a people watcher, and today her observations of the passing scene were especially sharp.

Here was a handsome, petulant woman with a tired husband, there a middle-aged man pushing a young girl in a wheelchair, here a young couple with shining faces and cheap new honeymoon luggage, there two businessmen arguing, and an embarrassed mother struggling with a kicking child. Ebb and flow, and survive.

She saw Jill before the girl saw her. She hadn’t realized last night how tall Jill was. The height, like the hair, came from him. She had good carriage, a long, free stride in her pleated plaid skirt and camel-hair jacket. For a moment the men with the attache cases stopped arguing and turned to look after her.

Something leapt in Jennie. “Surprised by joy.” Who had written that? I’m surprised by joy. This person coming toward me now belongs to me! She put out her arms, and this time Jill came into them.

They stood then, laughing a little and crying a little, until Jennie spoke. A surge of energy and hope came running through her, and she grasped Jill’s hands.

“Didn’t I say it would be better today? I knew it would! Come on, let’s eat, let’s talk!”

But in the dining room they suddenly became silent.

“It’s funny, I don’t know how to start,” Jill said. “That’s what you said yesterday, isn’t it?”

“Just let it come as it wants.”

“It’s not coming.”

“All right, I’ve an idea. Tell me about your first time in New York.”

“Well, we stayed at the Plaza. I’d read all the Eloise books when I was a child, so I wanted to see it. We ate in the Oak Room, where Eloise must have had dinner some nights. And once we went out to a French restaurant— Lutece, I think—and had duck with orange sauce and two desserts.”

She seems younger than she did last night, Jennie thought. I mustn’t stare like this, she told herself, and buttered a roll instead.

“I love everything French. Of course, I’m glad I’m American, but if I couldn’t be American, I’d want to be French. My grandmother taught French before she retired.”

“Did she? My mother speaks French—not very well. She lived in France before the Nazis came, but she’s forgotten a lot. If you don’t use it, you know …”

“I’d like you to tell me more about her.”

“Well, I will. But it’s a long story.”

Mom would be stunned by all this; then she would weep.

“We had the best time together in France,” Jill resumed. “The best. She knew just where to go.”

“She sounds like fun.”

“We always had fun in our family. Would you like to see some family pictures? I’ve brought an envelope full.” Jill leaned across the table. “Here’s one with all of us, taken last summer on Dad’s birthday.”

Eight or ten people stood and sat on some steps below a door with flowering shrubs on either side. In a corner of the foreground was the edge of a barbecue kettle. An American family scene, Grant Wood, but contemporary. Jennie startled herself with a touch of jealousy and stifled it at once.

“All those children …” she began.

“Isn’t it amazing? Mom had four of her own with no trouble at all after they got me. But I understand that often happens. This is Jerry next to me, he’s a year and a half younger. This is Lucille, she’s fifteen, this is Sharon, she’s twelve, and here’s Mark, the baby. He’s seven.”

“And this is your mother?”

“No, that’s Aunt Fay. This is Mom here in front of Dad.”

Here they were, this very average-looking man and woman in T-shirts and shorts, smiling for the camera and squinting into the light. These were the parents who had held and cherished the hand that now brushed Jennie’s as they passed the pictures back and forth.

Some comment had to be made. “They look young.”

Jill considered. “Yes, younger than they are. And they act young. They’re happy people… . You know, I feel sorry for people with messed-up families! Half the people I meet seem to come from homes where nobody laughs. Or where they hate each other, you know?”

“I know.”

“Were you ever married, Jennie?” The tone and the look were childishly blunt; in an older person they would be thought of as rude.

“No,” Jennie said, feeling discomfort, which she covered with enthusiasm. “Have you got more pictures?”

“Well, let’s see. Here’s one. We go skiing a lot. We only have to drive an hour.”

Behind the group and around it lay mountains, folded and ridged like newspapers that someone had crumpled and flung to the ground, dark and dry, the color of cinders next to the snow.

“Once I imagined you were in California,” Jennie said. “I kept seeing the Pacific.”

“New Mexico’s just as beautiful, in a different way. Our sky’s so large, so blue all day, and the sunset’s rose-colored, so bright that it burns.”

Jennie smiled. “You speak like a poet.”

“I write poetry. Very bad, I’m sure.”

This girl, like most people, was multifaceted, a cluster of contradictions. The previous night she had been, among other things, cool and controlling. Today she was ever so charmingly naive.

“You really ought to see New Mexico. Do you ski?”

Jennie shook her head. “It’s an expensive sport.”

“Oh. Have you got problems? Are you poor?”

The question amused Jennie. “Some people might call me poor.” The top-floor walk-up, the simple furnishings. “I’m satisfied with what I have, so I don’t feel poor.”

“You must be happy with your work, then.”

“I am. I’m a defender of women—poor women, mostly. And now I seem to be taking on another interest, too, something I didn’t know I cared about that much.” She was aware that pride had crept into her tone, born of a surprising impulse to show who she was and what she had achieved. “I’m in the middle of a tremendously important fight right now.”

“I’d like to hear about it,” Jill said, laying down her fork.

So Jennie, divulging neither name nor location, related the story of the Green Marsh. The story grew vivid in the telling; this was the first time she had spoken of the issue to anyone not involved in it, and as she talked, she could feel the strength of her own convictions coming through.

“There’s a movement something like that at home,”

Jill said when Jennie had finished, “to save the Jerez Mountains from developers. Dad’s active in it. He’s on every conservation committee you can think of. We’ve each got our thing. Mine’s Indians, their social structure, ancient and modern.” She regarded Jennie over the rim of the coffee cup. “Peter’s done work on the southwestern Indians too. That’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think?” And when no comment came, she asked, “Do you mind that I even mention him at all?”

Jennie’s reply was quiet. “Jill, I do mind some. I don’t want to think about him. Please understand that.”

“If you hated him so, why didn’t you have an abortion?”

“Oh, my God, the questions you ask! It wasn’t a matter of hatred. I didn’t hate him then, and I don’t now.” She put out her hand and laid it over the girl’s free hand. “I never even considered an abortion.” She could have said, “They wanted me to,” but she refrained. “Never.”

Jill looked over Jennie’s head across the room. Jennie thought, I’m learning her ways already. She looks beyond you, or down at the floor as she did last night, when she is considering her next words.

The next words came. “I’m surprised you never married. Didn’t you ever want to be?”

An honest answer was expected. But Jennie could only be halfway honest about this.

“Once.”

“To my father?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“How awful for you!”

“For the moment, yes, it was.”

“Only for the moment? But didn’t you love him?”

“If you can call it love. I thought it was, anyway.”

Jill, not answering that, looked down again. And Jennie, relieved for the moment of face-to-face contact, examined her once more. How much might she already know of love? Men would find her appealing; to be sure, she didn’t have classic beauty, the symmetry that once had been essential in our culture, but standards had changed. That hair alone was enough, then the assurance, the intelligence—”A delightful girl,” Mr. Riley had said, or maybe it had been Emma Dunn.

“So whether or not it was love, you had me.”

Jennie said steadily, “Yes, I went away by myself and had you. I was alone. My parents never knew.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“It would have hurt them too much. It’s hard to explain. You would have to know them to understand why.”

“I can’t imagine having a baby at my age.”

“I was younger than you are now.”

“How frightened you must have been. No, I can’t imagine it,” Jill murmured in a tender voice.

“I couldn’t imagine it, either.”

That cloud again, that heavy gray blanket, oppressed Jennie. A dull sadness fell into the iridescent room. People were pleasantly chattering away; so many were in family groups of all ages. Festive and at ease with one another …

Jill cried out, “How brave you were!”

“Where there’s no choice, one had better be.”

“How terribly hard for you to give your baby away!”

“If I had known you or even held you, it would have been impossible, and I knew that. So I never once looked at you when you were born.”

“Did you think about me often afterward?”

Where am I finding the strength for this torture? Jennie asked herself.

“I tried not to. But sometimes I imagined where you lived and what your name might be.”

“It’s a silly name, isn’t it? A silly combination. Victoria is for Mother’s sister, who died. Jill is the name they call me by.”

Jill smiled, showing teeth of the immaculate evenness that is usually the work of an orthodontist. Yes, she had had the best care.

“I couldn’t allow myself to think about you. It was done, finished. You were in good hands, and I had to go on. You can see that, can’t you?” And Jennie heard the plea in her own question.

“You picked yourself up and went to law school. You made something out of your life. Yes, I can see.”

It was a simple observation to which Jennie could think of no reply, so she made none. The even dialogue —statement given, statement returned—seemed to have reached a stopping place.

Jill spoke next. “But after all, you haven’t told me very much about yourself, have you?”

“I don’t know what else there is to tell you. I’ve given the facts. There aren’t very many.”

Abruptly a new expression passed across Jill’s face: a puzzlement in the eyes; a tightening, almost a severity, about the mouth. Subtly but unmistakably, another atmosphere had come between the two women. But it was understandable, wasn’t it? With such floods of feeling, two sets of experiences, two lives so wide apart in age, in place … and everything …

Cheerfully, to dispel this atmosphere, Jennie suggested dessert. A waiter came, fussed with the plates, and recommended pastries from the cart.

“I really don’t want one,” Jill said. “I only took it to make the lunch last longer.”

The admission touched Jennie. “We’ll find a place to sit and talk some more in one of the lounges. No need to hurry,” she coaxed brightly.

“I thought perhaps you might be in a hurry. Then why don’t we go to your place?”

Jennie shrank. They had been an hour and a half over this lunch, and still she hadn’t made the point she’d intended to make. Jill must understand there could be no more visits to the apartment. She must. What if, for instance, Jay were to take it into his head to drop in this very afternoon? Or any other time?

“Jill, I have to tell you, I’m sorry, but we can’t go to my place.”

The clear eyes opened wide, alert on the instant, probing as they had done last night.

“Why not?”

What trust can you have in a person who hides her true self for years, and then suddenly decides to reveal herself? Jennie thought. You can only wonder what else is hidden… .

Her nervous hands, palms upturned, made a small protest.

“It’s terribly difficult to say this, to explain. But there are things—deep personal things, reasons—” Helpless before that probing gaze, she stopped.

Jill waited, saying nothing, which forced her to begin again.

“You see … I tried to say it yesterday, but I did it very badly, I know, and gave you the wrong idea, that I didn’t care about you. But the way things are with me … There are reasons. “The nervous hands were in her lap now, clasping each other. “What I’m trying to say is, you mustn’t get in touch with me. You mustn’t ever come to my house or even telephone. You have to promise me that. I’ll be the one to get in touch with you.”

“I don’t understand,” Jill said. Her cheeks were flushed.

The aura that had begun to warm them when they embraced in the lobby and talked across the table, the intimate sadness, the tenderness, the animation, all now vanished under the new atmosphere.

“I don’t like it, Jennie. First you give and next you take back. Why?”

“I know it’s hard to understand. If you could just trust me—”

“You don’t seem to trust me!”

“How can you say that? I do trust you. Of course I do.”

“No, you’re hiding something.”

How stern she was! And a fighter too. She’d fight for principles and stand up for rights, her own and others’. In the space of an instant, Jennie saw who Jill was.