Blood Ties (2 page)

“Barat?” he asked.

“And where did you go?”

“Notre Dame.”

“I've heard of it.”

She had told a joke. His laughter filled the room, and others turned to look. It was like a public announcement.

“I never heard him laugh before,” Willa Lonum said. “No one laughs in the office.” Willa was over thirty and more or less in charge of the paralegals. She had been with the firm forever, or so thought the younger women.

“Tell him a joke.”

Willa did not quite laugh, but it seemed to take an effort. She needed no prompting to tell Martha all about the scion of the Casey family.

“The what?”

“Heir apparent. Prince of Wales. Golden boy.”

“I suppose he's engaged.”

“You suppose wrong. No one has yet passed the test.”

“What test?”

“Casey senior's. Bernard is his only son.”

“Are there sisters?”

Willa leaned toward her, eyes wide, and whispered, “Five. All older. They were trying for a son, and when they got him, that was that.”

Martha never quizzed Willa about the Caseys; she didn't have to. Family lore poured from Willa as if she had no family of her own and lived vicariously through the families of the senior members of the firm. Willa already had the look of a maiden aunt, one of those women who devote themselves to their work and their nephews and nieces and might just as well be nuns. Willa went to Mass every morning at St. Peter's on Madison before coming to the office and was given to special devotions.

“I started a novena for you,” she confided to Martha.

“It sounds like skin cream.”

“Don't.” Just that. Don't. Willa never made light of her religious beliefs. One morning Martha stopped by St. Peter's. Willa was in a front pew. Masses were said on the hour, and in the confessionals along the side of the nave penitents came and went. Martha took a bulletin when she left. Confessions were heard all day long at St. Peter's, every day but Sunday. Most of the people Sheila had seen in the pews reminded her of the homeless center. The thought that religion was largely a comfort for the unfortunate was not one she would have expressed to Willa.

Her first date with Bernard was hardly that. They went to the Art Institute one lunch hour, impromptu. He stopped by her desk. Well, not quite. He was passing and then stopped and came back.

“Where do you have lunch?”

She opened a drawer and showed him her apple. She felt like Eve.

“That's lunch?”

“I'm on a diet.”

She might have been inviting his appraisal. She got it. “I'll bet you exercise, too.”

“Doesn't everyone?”

“I don't know everyone. Have you seen the Degas exhibit?”

She had seen it the previous weekend, she said. “Is that where you're going?”

“We can get some lunch there.”

“I could bring my apple.”

“Don't you dare.”

They walked around the exhibit, but it was very crowded, worse than on the weekend.

“You've already seen it?”

She nodded, wishing she hadn't mentioned it.

“Then we can have lunch.”

But the cafeteria in the museum was swarming with people. He turned to her.

“This wasn't a very good idea.”

“Come back on Saturday.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“A suggestion.”

“Would you come with me?”

“Sure.”

That easily, she dismissed from her mind a half promise to golf with her parents. Martha was beginning to feel that the hand of destiny was on her shoulder.

“We better go somewhere else for lunch.”

“I don't have time.”

“Sure you do.”

“Could I tempt you with my apple?”

“You already have.”

Back at her desk, he pulled up a chair and split the apple in two with his bare hands while Sheila was contemplating using her letter opener to cut it.

“One of my skills,” he said, offering her half.

“I thought you didn't exercise.”

“Did I say that?”

Half the fun of the coming weeks was remembering what he had said when they were together. The Saturday visit was a great success. Afterward, they had lunch in a pub and drank beer and talked, each giving the other an oral CV. At four o'clock, they were still talking.

“I'm glad you were free today.”

“But I wasn't. I was supposed to golf with my parents.”

“Tell me about them.”

“I already have.”

“All I know is that your father is a doctor and your mother … well, is a mother.”

Suddenly she realized that they weren't really her parents. Her tales about Uncle Maurice, which had delighted him, seemed equally irrelevant. Nothing she could say of her supposed relatives explained her being in the world. Her mind seemed to fill with silence as she listened for some clue to who she really was. She felt like an impostor.

“I have to go.”

“My car is nearby.”

“I can walk.”

“Walk?”

She told him where her apartment was.

“But that's miles away.”

“I walk it every morning.”

“In gym shoes?”

“Of course.”

“I'll walk you there.”

“No you won't.” She hesitated. “You don't have gym shoes.”

“I'll buy some.”

They parted outside. She walked home—in street shoes, not a good idea—and then sat looking out the window toward the lake while evening enveloped the apartment in a pensive twilight. She realized she loved Bernard. He seemed to love her. So what did that mean? Someday, and soon, she would have to tell him the truth about herself. But the truth was she didn't know the truth. It was in the darkening apartment that she resolved to discover who she really was. When the phone rang, she went to it. Caller ID told her it was her mother. She did not pick up the phone. If it had been Maurice, she would have answered, but he was now in California, half a continent away.

3

At first, Sheila Lynch had thought of it as second best, making someone else's child their own, but that thought was quickly erased by the elation of being a mother. She had been devastated when she miscarried twice and then was told that she would never have a baby. Ever since she had ceased being a little girl there had been warnings about getting pregnant, from the nuns and from her mother, not that the message was ever that direct. A girl should save herself for the man she would marry. Her body was a temple to be kept immaculate until marriage, and then what had been a danger would become a beautiful opportunity. Oh, how wonderful she had felt when she first became pregnant and George was as expectant as she was. His decision to take a residency at the Mayo Clinic in pathology had sent a chill through her.

“Pathology!”

“It's lab work, mainly. I love working in a lab.”

Originally he had intended to do graduate work in chemistry, but the pull of medicine was strong. Pathology represented, in a way, the best of both worlds. The years in Rochester had been like a vacation. They lived out of town in a huge house with enough land to be a farm. They had kept horses then, and three dogs. George received an offer to stay at the clinic and teach the pathology he had learned there. It had been a very difficult decision, but he had a long talk with her father and decided instead to join a group of pathologists in Fox River.

It was in Rochester that Sheila became pregnant for the first time, but not even the resources of the famed clinic could save her baby. The next year, she became pregnant again, and after her second miscarriage she was told her fate. It was like being told she really wasn't a woman. Part of the sadness was due to her parents' obvious longing for grandchildren. Now their only hope lay with her younger brother, Maurice, and what kind of hope was that?

There had followed several very bad years. At first she refused to accept what she had been told and sent up a barrage of prayers, asking for a miracle. Wasn't every pregnancy a miracle of sorts? In the end, even God had seemed against her. She thought bitterly that she might just as well have become a nun. George had been so patient with her, in his inarticulate way, that somehow she got through the terrible despondency. But the first time he mentioned adoption she didn't speak to him for a week. She realized that she was waiting for him to bring it up again. He didn't, so she did.

“I suppose we could get a black baby easily.”

“Or Chinese.”

When she was a little girl, Sheila had an African-American doll, not that it was called that in those days. The thought of that doll becoming a living breathing child filled her with mixed feelings. It would have seemed like an extension of the charity work they were already involved in.

“I suppose it takes forever anyway.” Adoption agencies were notoriously more demanding than God in allotting children to couples.

“Not necessarily.”

One of the places they volunteered was the Women's Care Center, devoted to talking young women in trouble out of getting an abortion. The center could arrange for the Lynches to adopt one of the saved babies. Sheila agreed that they should look into it.

The girl whose baby they would have was so beautiful it was impossible to imagine that the man who had made her pregnant would not marry her.

“That's not unusual,” Irene told them. Irene managed the center, inspired to do so by an abortion she had lived to regret.

“Oh.”

“Madeline could decide to keep the baby.”

“A single mother?”

“It's not unheard of now. Anything is better than abortion.”

“When will she decide?”

“After she meets you.”

“I couldn't ask her to give up her baby!”

“Then don't. Just get to know her.”

Sheila murmured, “I already know her.”

“I mean really know her.”

“Have you told her…”

“Wasn't that all right?”

Suddenly Sheila felt manipulated. All they had done was talk about the possibility of taking some baby; there had been no decision, no promise.

“It was all right,” George said. Sheila was flooded with emotion. She herself desperately wanted a baby, but she wanted her own. Hadn't she realized that George, too, had lived through the months of her pregnancies with visions of fatherhood dancing in his head? Of course he had. It helped Sheila to tell herself that she was doing this for George.

Their conversation with Madeline had never touched on the reason they were having the conversation. It was an hour of chitchat, about everything in the world but the baby Madeline was carrying. How must it have been for the girl to think that the life she was carrying would be separated from her forever at birth? Sheila tried to think of Madeline as a daughter, but that was impossible. She wasn't three years older than the girl. So she imagined Madeline was her sister, to whose aid she was coming in time of trouble. What had Madeline imagined?

“Taking the baby home,” Irene said. “And facing her parents with a bundle in her arms.”

“Do they know?”

Irene shook her head. How was it possible for parents not to know their daughter was expecting a baby? It turned out they lived in California. Madeline was a student at Northwestern; as far as her parents knew she was dutifully going to classes. That was what Madeline told them in her letters home.

“She likes you, Sheila,” Irene said. “She says you will be the mother she can't be.”

Sheila burst into tears that washed away any reluctance she had to take Madeline's baby. The last time Sheila saw Madeline, she was nearing term. Sheila took her in her arms, and they sat for a long time in silence.

“Thank you,” Madeline said, and began to sob.

“Thank you,” Sheila said, and she, too, was crying. Two weeping women who would never see one another again.

The transfer was almost sleight-of-hand. George assisted at the birth, and the baby was taken away immediately before Madeline came out of the haze. It was brought to the waiting Sheila.

“You have a girl,” the nurse said.

George came out in street clothes, and they drove away with their baby.

Fifteen-year-old Maurice, fresh from his most recent expulsion from school, was godfather at the baptism, at her parents' insistence; they thought it might help him grow up. But afterward he had taken the second cousin who was godmother out to his car, where they had been surprised in a sweaty embrace. Of course the Dolans blamed the girl. Why were others always leading Maurice astray?

4

If Marie Murkin had to pick the alpha and omega of the people who made use of the senior center Edna Hospers ran in what once had been the parish school, she wouldn't hesitate, not for a minute. It would be Martin Sisk and Dr. Henry Dolan, and Martin would be the end of the alphabet. The rectory housekeeper often lamented the liturgical revolution that had changed the Church of her not so pious youth into, well, no need to go into that, but one thing she didn't miss was altar boys. There had still been a gang of them when she came to work at St. Hilary's, fussed over by the Franciscans, little urchins transformed into miniature friars when they vested to do their duties. It had been the Fe Fi Fo Fums—as Marie had irreverently dubbed the OFMs in the privacy of her own mind—who insisted on a surplice with a cowl, as if the kids, too, were friars. Part of their training seemed to be learning how to treat the housekeeper with the same merry contempt the priests showed. Honestly, there were days when Marie went up the back stairs to her room and looked in the mirror to see if she really was invisible. But she had toughed it out and fought the temptation to leave on a fiery note, and in the fullness of time the Franciscans left and Father Roger Dowling was made pastor, so the parish was back in the hands of a real priest. It seemed a clear case of virtue rewarded.

“What do you know of Martin Sisk, Marie?” Father Dowling had asked some weeks before.