Keeping Faith: A Novel (3 page)

I figured that motherhood would be something that descended naturally, the same way my milk came in–a little painful, a little awe-inspiring,

but part of me now for better or for worse. I waited patiently. So what if I didn’t know how to use a rectal thermometer on my child? So what if I tried to swaddle her and the blanket never tucked tight? Any day now, I told myself, I am going to wake up and know what I am doing.

It was sometime after Faith’s third birthday that I stopped hoping. For whatever reason, being a mother will never come easily to me. I watch women with multiple children effortlessly settle everyone in place in their vans, while I have to check Faith’s safety belt three times, just to make sure it’s really snapped tight. I hear mothers lean down to speak to their children, and I try to memorize the things they say.

The thought of trying to get to the bottom of Faith’s stubborn silence makes my stomach flip. What if I can’t do it? What kind of mother does that make me? “I’m not ready,” I hedge.

“For God’s sake, Mariah, get over yourself. Get dressed, brush your hair, act like a normal woman, and before you know it, you won’t be acting anymore.” My mother shakes her head.

“Colin told you you were a shrinking violet for ten years, and you were stupid enough to believe him. What does he know from nervous breakdowns?”

She sets a cup of coffee in front of me;

I know that she considers it a triumph to have me sitting at the kitchen table, instead of holed up in bed. When I was committed, she was living in Scottsdale, Arizona–where she’d moved after my father died. She flew in after my suicide attempt and went home when she felt assured that the danger was over. Of course, she hadn’t counted on Colin’s having me institutionalized. When she discovered what he had done, she sold the condo, returned here, and spent four months overturning the legal writ so that I could be released of my own volition. She never believed Colin was right to have me sent to Greenhaven, and she’s never forgiven him. As for me, well, I don’t know. Sometimes, like my mother, I think that he shouldn’t have been deciding how I felt, no matter how unresponsive I was at the time. And sometimes I remember that Greenhaven was the one place I felt comfortable, because there nobody was expected to be perfect.

“Colin,” my mother says succinctly, “is a schmuck. Thank God Faith takes after you.”

She pats my shoulder. “Do you remember the time you came home in fifth grade, with a B-minus on your math test? And you cried like you thought we were going to put you on the rack–but we couldn’t have cared less? You did your best; that’s what was important. You tried. Which is more than I can say for you today.” She looks through the open doorway, to the living-room floor, where Faith is coloring with crayons. “Don’t you know by now that raising a child is always a work in progress?”

Faith picks up the orange crayon and scribbles violently over the construction paper.

I remember how last year, when she was learning letters, she’d scrawl a long stream of consonants and ask me what she’d spelled.

“Frzwwlkg,” I’d say, and to my surprise I made her laugh.

“So go already.” My mother pushes me toward the living room.

The first thing I do is trip over the box of crayons. “I’m sorry.” I gather fistfuls in my hands, set them back in the holiday Oreo tin we use to store them. When I’m finished, I rock back on my heels, to find Faith staring coldly at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, but I am not speaking of the crayons.

When Faith doesn’t respond, I look down at the paper she’s been drawing on. A bat and a witch, dancing beside a fire. “Wow–this is really neat.” Inspiration strikes; I pick up the drawing and hold it close. “Can I keep it? Hang it downstairs in my workshop?”

Faith tips her head, reaches for the picture,

and rips it down the middle. Then she runs up the stairs and slams her bedroom door.

My mother comes in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “That went well,” I say dryly.

She shrugs. “You can’t change the world overnight.”

Reaching for one half of Faith’s artwork, I run my fingers over the waxy resistance of the witch. “I think she was drawing me.”

My mother tosses the dish towel at me; it lands unexpectedly cool against my neck. “You think too much,” she says.

That night while I am brushing my teeth I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am not unattractive, or so I learned at Greenhaven. Orderlies and nurses and psychiatrists look through you when you are disheveled and complaining; on the other hand, a pretty face gets noticed, and spoken to, and answered. At Greenhaven I cut my hair short,

into honey-colored waves; I wore makeup to play up the green of my eyes. I spent more time on my appearance during those few months than I ever had in my life.

Sighing, I lean toward the mirror and wipe a spot of toothpaste from the corner of my mouth.

When Colin and I moved into this farmhouse, we replaced this bathroom mirror. The old one had been cracked at the corner–bad luck,

I said. The new mirror, we didn’t know where to hang. At five-foot-four, eye level for me was not eye level for Colin. A foot taller and lanky, he laughed when I’d first held up the mirror. “Rye,” he said, “I can barely see my chest.”

So instead we put the mirror where Colin could see it. I would stand on tiptoe to see the whole of my face. I never quite measured up.

In the middle of the night I feel the blankets rustle. A drift of air, a soft solidness pressed against me. Rolling over, I wrap my arms around Faith.

“This is what it would be like,” I whisper to myself,

and I let my throat swell up before I can even finish my thought. Her arms come around me like a vine. Her hair, tucked beneath my chin, smells of childhood.

My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct, but an instinct.

The flannel of our nightgowns hooks and catches. I rub Faith’s back in silence,

afraid to say anything that might ruin this good fortune, and I wait for her breathing to level before I let myself fall asleep. This one thing, this I can do.

The town where we live, New Canaan, is large enough to have its own mountain, small enough to hold rumors in the nooks and crannies of the weathered clapboard storefronts. It is a town of farms and open land, of simple people rubbing shoulders with professionals from Hanover and New London who want their money to go a little bit further in real estate. We have a gas station, an old playground, and a bluegrass band. We also have one attorney, J. Evers Standish, whose shingle I’ve passed a million times driving up and down Route 4.

Six days after Colin has left, I answer the front door to find a sheriff’s deputy on the porch, asking me if I am indeed Mrs.

Mariah White. My first thought is for Colin–

has he been in a car accident? The sheriff reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, and he is gone before I can ask him what he’s brought me.

The first concrete act of divorce is called a libel. It’s a little piece of paper that,

held in your hand, has the power to change your whole life. I will not know until months later that New Hampshire is the only state that still calls it a libel, instead of a complaint or a petition, as if part of the process, however amicable, involves a slight to one’s character.

Attached to the note is the piece of paper that says a divorce is being served against me.

Thirty minutes later I am sitting in the waiting room of J. Evers Standish’s office,

Faith curled in the corner with a battered Brio train set. I would not have brought her, but my mother has been gone all morning–off, she said, to get us both a surprise. A door behind the receptionist opens, and a tall, polished brunette walks out, hand extended. “I’m Joan Standish.”

My jaw drops open. “You are?” For years,

in passing the building, I’ve pictured J.

Evers Standish as an older man with muttonchops.

The attorney laughs. “The last time I checked, I was.” She glances at Faith,

absorbed in creating a tunnel for the train.

“Nan,” she asks her receptionist, “could you keep an eye on Mrs. White’s daughter?”

And as if I am pulled by a thread, I follow the lawyer into her office.

The funny thing is, I’m not upset. Not nearly as upset as I was the afternoon Colin left.

Something about this libel seems completely over the top, like a joke with the punch line forthcoming.

Something Colin and I will laugh about when the lights are out and we’re holding each other a few months from now.

Joan Standish explains the libel to me. She asks me if I want to see a therapist or hear about referral programs. She asks what happened. She talks about divorce decrees and financial affidavits and custody, while I let the room whirl around me. It seems impossible that a wedding can take a year to plan but a divorce is final in six weeks–as if all the time in between, the feelings have been dwindling to the point where they can be scattered with one angry breath.

“Do you think Colin will want joint custody of your daughter?”

I stare at the attorney. “I don’t know.”

I cannot imagine Colin living without Faith. But then again I cannot imagine myself living without Colin.

Joan Standish narrows her eyes and sits down on her desk, across from me. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. White,” she begins, “you seem a little … removed from all this. It’s a very common reaction, you know, to just deny what’s been legally set into motion, and therefore to just let the whole thing steamroll over you. But I can assure you that your husband has, in fact, started the judicial wheels turning to dissolve your marriage.”

I open my mouth, then snap it shut again.

“What?” she asks. “If I’m going to represent you, you’ll have to confide in me.”

I look into my lap. “It’s just that …

well. We went through this, sort of, once before.

What happens to all … this … if he decides to come back?”

The attorney leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Mrs. White, you truly see no difference between then and now? Did he hurt you last time?” I nod. “Did he promise you he’d change? Did he come back to you?” She smiles gently. “Did he sue for divorce last time?”

“No,” I murmur.

“The difference between then and now,” Joan Standish says, “is that this time he’s done you a favor.”

Our seats for the circus are in the very first row.

“Ma,” I ask, “how did you get tickets this close?”

My mother shrugs. “I slept with the ringmaster,”

she whispers, and then laughs at her own joke.

Her surprise from yesterday involved a trip to the Concord TicketMaster, to get us all seats at the Ringling Brothers Circus, playing in Boston. She reasoned that Faith needed something that might get her excited enough to chatter again. And once she heard about the libel, she said that I should consider the trip to Boston a celebration.

My mother hails a man selling Sno-Cones and buys one for Faith. The clowns are working the stands. I see some that I recognize–could they be the same after all these years? One with a white head and a blue smile leans over the low divider in front of us. He points to his suspenders,

polka-dotted, then to Faith’s spotted shirt, and claps his hands. When Faith blushes,

he mutely mouths the word “Hello.” Faith’s eyes go wide, then she answers him, just as silently.

The clown reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a greasepaint crayon. He cups Faith’s chin in one hand, andwiththe other draws a wide, splitting smile over her lips. He colors musical notes on her throat and winks.

He hops away from the divider, ready to entertain some other child, and then turns back at the last minute. Before I can manage to duck away,

he reaches for my face. His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

Although it is not something I remember, when I was little I tried to join the circus.

My parents took me to the Boston Garden every year when Ringling Brothers came to town, and to say I loved it would be an understatement. In the weeks leading up to the show I’d wake in the middle of the night, my chest tight with flips and my eyes blind with sequins, my sheets smelling of tigers and ponies and bears. When I was actually at the circus, I’d school my eyes not to blink,

aware that it would be gone as quickly as the cotton candy that melted away to nothing in the heat of my mouth.

The year I was seven I was mesmerized by the Elephant Girl. The daughter of the ringmaster,

glittering and sure, she stepped on the trunk of an enormous elephant and shimmied up it, the way I sometimes walked up the playground slide. She sat with her thighs clamped around the thick, bristly neck of the elephant and stared at me the whole time she circled the center ring.