Eden Close (6 page)

How strange that they are speaking to each other in just the same tones of voice, using the same polite vocabulary, as they might have twenty-five years ago—as if nothing had intervened or changed in all those years, as if there had not been all that death and the birth of his own son.

She nods, and there is something in the tilt of her head
or the angle of her profile that gives him a sharp memory of the younger woman he remembers her to have been. He sees a woman's hand on a man's wrist, pulling him up the steps and inside, even though the laundry basket under the clothesline is still half full of wet sheets. He remembers knocking on the back door one afternoon when he was eight, carrying a basket of tomatoes from his mother's garden, bountiful that year, and Edith opening the door, flustered, a red blush staining her throat and chest where he could see it, her hair loose and damp at the temples. She was fingering the top of her dress, where the last two buttons were still undone, and he understood, if not entirely comprehended, that Jim was in the house somewhere, home early, and that they had been doing together something secretive and thrilling.

The knowledge had come before he had even known what it was or what it meant—the suggestion that there might be between a man and a woman something that set them apart, something that could not be shared by others and ought not to be seen from the outside.

And after that day, he would watch her carefully, as if important information could be had by examining her. For other boys in the town, boys who liked to climb onto the high leather seat in the dairy truck or boys he knew from the hockey rink or in the cold tiled corridors of the junior high school, the knowledge had come differently, more predictably, from girls seen naked on a dare in woodsheds or from pictures found in magazines. Sean O'Brien, who was the goalie when Andy and he were in ninth grade, and who would be killed only three short years later, had once told of finding lurid and wonderful pictures of men and women together in a drawer marked "Hinges" in his father's cellar; and later Andrew, when he had grown and had his own house, would sometimes have a fleeting and sad image of a middle-aged TV repairman retreating to the bowels of his house for furtive pleasure.

He was aware that she was different from his mother and from the other mothers—an awareness that was inadvertently encouraged by his mother's disapproval of her neighbor, which hovered somewhere between quiet outrage and thinly disguised envy.

"Edith is not discreet," his mother would pronounce, having caught sight of her across the yard, or remembering a gesture or a remark her neighbor had made that day. "Edith is sometimes quite careless," she would say, and his father would wisely just nod, although Andy sometimes thought he smiled. And one evening his father volunteered, "Well, at least they're well matched," and his mother had said, "Shush," indicating that the boy was in the room. Her tone alerted Andy to a sentence that otherwise might have gone unremembered, and caused him to save it, as children do, until he was old enough to understand it.

He understood also, with a child's unerring antennae, that the woman his mother envied loved only the one person and that she was indifferent to the world outside her door, as if she knew she must be careful not to squander her reserves. She had seemed, for example, always to be spectacularly indifferent to Andy, thinking of him only, he felt, as the neighbor's boy and then later as the fellow who helped with odd jobs around the house to earn money for college. He sometimes thought, in fact, that she didn't actually
see
him in the yard as he trimmed a blackberry bush or raked the leaves from the flower bed. He'd say hello and nod; yet she might just pass silently by, lost in her own vision, unaware of his presence.

She waves once just before she gets into the Plymouth, and Andrew climbs back up the ladder.

Jim, though, Andrew thinks to himself, did notice him
as a boy. He never passed Andy without a greeting or a question or even a piece of gum for the boy in his pocket. When the adults were in the yard, absorbed in each other, it would be Jim who would break away and take him by the hand—or even play a game of catch with him.

Scraping and painting the side of the house, as his own father did every five years, Andrew remembers the way Jim would watch his father when he worked—hands in his pockets, restless, but feeling no urgency to tackle his own chores. Jim was a man who started things but never finished them—unlike the steady, slow progress of Andy's father. And Andrew can remember being asked each August to tidy up a vegetable garden Jim had left too long to the weeds. In the spring, Jim would begin with enthusiasm, having bought exotic seeds from the catalogues and coming home each Saturday morning from the nursery with a shiny new tool or a bag of peat moss. But as the spring wove into summer, Andy would see him on the back stoop, smoking, drinking a beer and listening to the radio as if he had forgotten entirely that there was anything in the yard at all.

He was a tall man, a genial alcoholic, a man whose charm and smile made people say he was good-looking—though he was not, with his long face and its flat planes, a truly handsome man. It was understood that he had appetites—most obviously for women and for drink—though he didn't look the part. He was said to be irresistible to women, and as a teenager, Andy sometimes wondered if his mother's envy of her neighbor didn't spring from an unspoken and unacknowledged attraction to her neighbor's husband. He remembers that sometimes Jim would goose his mother in the yard, and she would, as she twisted away from him, giggle and look girlish.

He was attractive to Andy too, though differently, and primarily because he was not a dairyman, like Andy's father
and most of the other fathers Andy knew, but a salesman. That he only sold metal parts for farm machinery didn't bother Andy; it was the fact that Jim frequently left home for other places that seemed so grand. He was the first man Andy ever knew who routinely traded in what seemed to be barely used cars for new models every year—always a Buick and usually black, sitting gloriously in the gravel drive, making his own father's old Fords look like dusty country cousins. It was the traveling, he thinks now, that made Edith panicky in the mornings when Jim left her, sliding his hand down the curve of her narrow hip before he swung open the door of the Buick. He would lay his arm along the rim of the leather seat and back the Buick out the drive, waving cheerfully when he hit the road as if he were the only happy man in town.

And instantly she would be preoccupied, standing in the gravel drive long after he'd gone—as though he'd taken her with him. She would appear surprised and distracted if Andy's mother called to her—which Andy sometimes thought his mother did just for spite—and nearly deaf if he himself had to ask her a question about a chore or the whereabouts of a tool.

The worst, though, was her indifference to Eden. Even when Eden was small and her mother held her on her hip, Edith would seem for long seconds or even minutes to be oblivious to the child's entreaties—Eden, who seemed to have dimension and life in Edith's eyes only when Jim returned from wherever he had been.

 

H
E REMEMBERS
it as clearly as a just-told story, or he thinks he remembers it; it is hard now to sort out what he actually remembers on his own—this, his first true memory with a story and a plot—and what he might have been told later by his mother or his father or by Eden herself and then sketched into the picture he sees in his mind.

It was summer then too, he remembers, though earlier, fresher, June perhaps. A fine day, the morning, because his father was at work. And Jim, too, was traveling, because Andy's mother that night, using the phone, found him in a motel near Buffalo and called him home. Andy was in the garden with his mother. He remembers the scent of the soil, an evocative aroma he has not smelled for years, and a row of radishes, the fat red globes pushing up from the black earth. He was happy and rather proud, because his mother had said he could pick them. He remembers that he was wearing brown leather shoes and white socks and that the gap between the shoes and the socks was filling up with black dirt.

Edith came across the yard and stood by the gate in the wire fence. She was holding a bundle, wrapped in a yellow towel, in her arms. He knew at once, by the way she cradled it, that it was a baby—though possibly (the thought crossed his mind) it was the Closes' cat, sick somehow. The fact that she might just appear on a random morning with a baby didn't strike him as odd at all; friends of his mother's often just appeared at their door with new babies. It was much odder that the cat might be sick; after all, Andy had just seen it that morning, and it had seemed fine. It wasn't until he saw his neighbor's face, and then felt the way his mother got up from her knees to go to her at the gate, that he knew something was terribly wrong. It was a baby, but perhaps a sick baby, he thought.

"Edith," said his mother. He knew in the name there was a large question.

"I was vacuuming in the kitchen. And when I stopped, I heard a sound," said Edith Close. "It was a strange sound. I thought it was the cat, whining. Or a hurt bird. It was out front somewhere, and I wanted it to stop."

She was wearing, he remembers, the kind of dress she
always wore—a dress with a narrow waist and a top like a shirt, with sleeves she rolled to the elbow. Her forearms were narrow, and she had on gold bracelets. Her hair was parted in the middle and hung straight behind her shoulders, as she often combed it, in a style that would become fashionable years later with younger women. He remembers the bright red lipstick on her mouth, and that her face was white.

"And when I went to the door and opened it, there was ... there was this cardboard box, out near the road but just inside the privet hedge. It said Oxydol on the side, and I thought someone had thrown their garbage onto the lawn like they sometimes do with the beer bottles. And then I heard the sound again, and I was angry because I thought someone had left us a litter of kittens, and I knew how hard it would be to get rid of them....So I went to look, and the box was open and filled with towels, and this was in it, crying...."

Andy's mother leaned across the wire fence and pulled a bit of the material away from her neighbor's arms.

"Jesus God," said his mother, stepping back quickly as if she'd seen something deformed.

The two women stood looking at each other for a moment and didn't speak.

"What is it?" his mother asked finally.

The other woman didn't understand the question. "What is it...?"

"A boy or a girl?"

Edith looked momentarily stunned. Then she tilted her head back and closed her eyes. "Oh God, I wish Jim were here," she suddenly cried. "I don't know. I don't know." She looked as though she were about to fall, with the bundle in her arms.

"We'll go inside," said his mother quickly, clicking into gear in that way she had when there was a crisis or when he
had fallen and hurt himself. "We'll look at the baby and make sure it's all right and call the police. Then we'll find Jim."

She turned to look at Andy, crouched in the dirt. Her face was unusually cross. She spoke in the voice she used when she "meant business," and pointed her finger at him.

"You are not to leave this garden under any circumstances. Do you understand me?" It was not a question. "You stay here and you don't move until I come back for you. I have to go next door with Mrs. Close."

Chastened and frightened, for she had never left him alone with no adults around, he watched them walk toward the other house and disappear inside the back door.

 

T
HAT WAS
the first intruder, he thinks suddenly to himself, not the man who came in the August night, but the person who brought and left a child on a June morning fourteen years earlier. A parent himself, he tries to imagine what he has never thought of before: a woman stopping her car, the swift movement around the hedge. Had she hesitated, wept, bitten her lip for courage? Had a man or a boy brought her and insisted that she do this? Was she a young girl, a child herself, or an older woman with too many children to feed? Why that house and not another? Had she been driving up and down the road, searching for hours for the perfect doorstep? How had she been certain there was someone at the house to care for the baby?

"It might have been us," his father said that night at supper. His voice was unusually quiet. "It could so easily have been us."

And but for the accident of the other house facing the road, and theirs, seventy feet back, facing north, he came to understand, he might have had a sister, and that the fate of the child who would be called Eden had been determined by geography. And as he grew older and heard the story
often repeated, it was hard for him not to think of her as a near sibling, someone who might have been called Ruth or Debbie, as his mother planned to call the daughter who never came, and that she might have been his and theirs.

 

B
UT BEFORE
the day was out, she was not anyone's but Jim's. Andy's mother heard it in his voice on the telephone from Buffalo.

"How did he take it?" asked Andy's father when his mother put down the phone.

"He's coming right away. He sounded ... well, he just sounded very excited. And he asked the queerest questions," she said. "For a man."

"What questions?" said his father.

"He wanted to know ... well, he wanted to know how much it weighed and how old it was, and what it looked like, and what the doctor had said, in all the details," she said, smoothing her hands along the front of her apron. "Like a woman," she added, but, of course, not like the woman who ought to have asked those questions, her voice implied.

And then his mother shook her head and sighed: "Poor man." For they all knew that the baby would be taken away as soon as the police could arrange for a place in an orphanage or a foster home. When the police had come that morning, accompanied by Dr. Ryder, who examined the child, they had asked Mrs. Close if she would keep the baby until the matter was settled, and she had said yes but had not suggested that she herself wanted it. And yet it was common knowledge, as Andy's mother had reminded his father (and had later incorporated into the oft-told tale of Eden's arrival), that Jim especially wanted a child and that they had been trying for years to conceive one, despite Dr. Ryder's pronouncement that the environment of Mrs. Close's womb was "hostile" to Jim's seed. An irony not lost on anyone.