Rowing in Eden (36 page)

The four in the living room stood up for hugs. Franny felt moved at embracing this Martie who was more than Martie. She did her best not to look below Martie's neck as Martie picked up the bottle of scotch.

“I guess you need a drink to keep from freezing in here, don't you?” Martie smiled and screwed up one eye in a kind of wink at Brick. “So, how do you think good scotch will sit on top of cheap red wine?”

Peg drooped. “Oh, Martie, you weren't drinking in front of Leona's nephew, were you? I'll never hear the end of that.”

Martie leaned into Peg's shoulder with a laugh. “Hate to break it to you, kid, but Leona's sweet nephew
gave
me the wine, and also assured me that if I, or any of my friends, ever wanted any drugs, he was the guy to call.”

Peg shook her head. “How can it be that I go out in the same world as you, and no one ever offers me such things?”

“I don't know.” Martie looked up mischievously from pouring her drink. “Maybe you need to change the way you dress.”

You could not tell she was pregnant. She wore a big sweater and, if anything, her legs and face looked thinner than Franny remembered.

“Cheers!” She lifted the glass. Downed the shot.

“Say, toots!” Brick said. “That's sipping scotch!”

“Now, Brick,” Martie said, and this was it: Martie's eyes began to brim with tears. Franny felt her heart constrict. Martie was going to tell them, any moment now—

“Brick”—Martie grinned and pressed her fingers to the inner corners of her eyes, stemming the tears—“didn't you ever just want to drink something really good straight down?” She sniffled and laughed. “Sure you did.”

Brick turned toward Peg, then, to mutter, “What's all this?” which Peg took as her signal to stand with a clap of the hands and
declare that
she
needed to get cracking on peeling potatoes for
mañana
, and didn't she have some volunteers lined up to help?

“No, no!” Martie set down her empty glass as Franny rose from the couch, eager to move off to the kitchen before another word was spoken.

“Everybody, listen up!” Martie said. “Rosamund, put down the magazine, please. I want your full attention.”

Rosamund looked askance at the request, but closed the magazine in her lap.

“I have an announcement to make.” With a grin, Martie raised a finger to the group. Closed her eyes. Took a deep breath and released it. “Just wait!” she said tearfully, then raised her shoulders up to her ears, dropped them. Up. Down.

“For goodness sakes, Martie, what is this?” Brick asked.

Martie's face crumpled. “What it is—” She looked at Franny. Shook her head. Then mouthed, as the tears started down her cheeks,
You tell.

Franny's heart sank. “Are you sure?”

Martie loosed a shuddering laugh. “Please.”

“Well.” Franny's forehead and cheeks prickled like a foot gone to sleep. Around the small lighted spot in which they stood, the room was black and gold, and everyone looked her way, waiting. “Well, Martie's going to have a baby.”

“Hh!” Peg Wahl bent over, her arms clutched to her stomach. “I knew it. I think—I'm going to be sick.”

“Oh, Mom!” Franny said, just—
ashamed
of Peg's response, but then Brick grabbed Martie by her upper arms and he lifted her right into the air. “Is this true?” he shouted, and when Martie cringed and sobbed, “Yes,” he set her down with a shove that sent her toppling into the table that held the bottle of scotch and the tray of glasses, all of which fell with a crash and splintered and spilled across the floor.

“Dad,” Franny cried, “what are you doing?” and there was Brick's snarling face up against hers, yelling, “You keep out of this! You knew and didn't tell us?” He looked over at Peg, his face
bloated with disbelief. “What kind of brothel are we running here, anyway?” he demanded.

“She's ruined our lives, Brick.” Peg sat down on the floor where she stood. “We're ruined because she wanted to spread her legs for some boy.”

Martie, stranded in the mess of glass and scotch, leaned into the curve of the baby grand like a boxer thrown against the ropes. “That is so
low,”
she moaned. “I'm having this baby, and—you need to show respect. It's your grandchild—”

“No!” Head in her hands, Peg wailed, “Don't even talk! You are no longer my daughter! Don't you imagine for one minute that we'd ever, ever let you bring it here. Never. And you”—she pointed a finger at Franny as Franny began to pick her way through the broken glass and scotch to Martie's side—“you stay away from her! Get!”

Franny shook her head. At least there was some comfort in holding Martie.

“We're probably the laughingstocks of Pynch Lake,” Brick said. “If you told that damned Deedee Pierce—did you tell that blabbermouth Deedee?—oh, Christ. You're a perfect idiot, aren't you?”

Rosamund did not say a word until the point at which Brick demanded,
And who the hell's the father?
Then Rosamund stood, dropping the blanket back on the couch. “Daddy,” she said, “may I, please, speak to Martie alone for a few minutes?”

“Oh, hell.” Brick turned from Martie as if he could not bear the sight of her. “I don't care what you do with her.”

“Dad!” Martie and Franny wailed then, but Rosamund appeared calm, if shaken, and she extended one hand to Martie and pointed the other toward the stairs:

“Come on. Let's go to my room for a minute and talk.”

Brick kept his back turned as Martie and Franny began to make their way out of the mess on the floor. The scotch was sticky. It was sticky on their shoes even when the girls had moved beyond the wet.

“You stay here, Fran,” Peg said, but Rosamund said, “It's okay, Mom,” and Franny kept moving.

Rosamund, Martie, Franny. Heading up the stairs. Entering
Rosamund's room. Franny and Martie took seats on the twin bed closest to the door.

“Here.” Rosamund pulled the spread off the second bed and wrapped it around Martie from behind, meanwhile shooting Franny a stormy look:
Why didn't you tell me?

“I figured they'd be bastards,” Martie sobbed. “They've always treated me like there was something wrong with me—I was too noisy, I was too whatever. Still, I hoped that I'd get some support here—and Mom's saying I'm not even her daughter!”

“I wish you'd talked to me about this first, Martie,” Rosamund said. She sounded calm, if slightly irritated. “Mother and Daddy wouldn't have needed to know, and you could have been spared some of this.”

“But I wanted them to know, Roz! It's going to be their grandchild!”

For Franny's benefit, Rosamund raised her eyes toward the ceiling to show how forbearing she had to be. “But how could you possibly have thought they'd accept this, Martie? And how could you possibly have a baby now?”

Martie cast an imploring glance toward Franny. “I have ideas, don't I, Fran? Some people were talking about getting a farmhouse. I'm not sure that's going to happen, now, but—oh, and I was thinking maybe I could come here and get a job in Dad's office. I must have been out of my mind to think he'd help.”

“I'd help,” Franny said. “After school, I could baby-sit. And on weekends. And the baby could have my room—”

Sh!
Rosamund signalled Franny as she began to massage Martie's shoulders. “Martie,” she said, “you're smart and attractive and you've got your whole life ahead of you. I'm sure you'll make an excellent mom—”

“I will!” Martie said. She let her head fall forward with a moan. “That feels so good, Roz.”

“I meant
someday
, Martie. Also, you haven't mentioned the father, which is fine, but it doesn't sound like you're getting married, right? And—you're still in school!”

From beneath her curtain of hair, Martie murmured, “Flunking out. I was taking care of Milton and his friends, cooking and cleaning. It was hard to get to classes—”

According to Rosamund, Martie looked at things incorrectly. Didn't Martie realize that Peg and Brick could figure out a way to get Martie a medical excuse? Then, if Martie got the pregnancy taken care of, Rosamund doubted Martie would have to deal with anything much worse than filing for a few “incompletes.”

Martie leaned back against Rosamund now, and looked up, tears streaming down her face. “But I don't know, Roz.”

“Sure you do.” Rosamund lifted Martie's hair with one hand while she massaged her neck with the other. “Mother and Daddy are kind of in shock now. You have to think not just about how hard your having a baby would be on them, but on the baby, too, and it could make it hard for you ever to find a husband.”

“I don't care!” Martie pulled away from Rosamund then. “The baby and I would have each other. Anyway”—she swiped her nose across the back of her hand—“it's too late to do anything now.”

A roar sounded below. Brick. Just—roaring, making a big sound of pain without the shape of words. Rosamund acted as if she did not hear the roar. “Don't be silly,” she said. “I know a girl who had it done in her sixth month. How far along can you be?”

Martie shrugged. Three and a half months, she guessed.

Three and a half months? According to Rosamund, that was not bad at all! “We can get this taken care of, Martie. I can make a few phone calls to the right people. What do you say?”

“I have to think.” Martie pulled the bedspread up over her head and looked out like a monk from his cowl. “I tried all those dumb things Mom tried on me. The gin. The horseback ride. I even bought a pair of knitting needles.”

“Martie!” Rosamund clapped her hands to her mouth.

“I didn't get very far.” Martie shook her head. “I figured, if I bled to death or something, what good would it have done me? Except Mom and Dad might have felt too bad to be pissed.”

Rosamund hugged Martie. Franny could not remember having
seen her hug Martie in that way before. A really
tight
hug. The sight made Franny want to hug both of them, and she did, albeit awkwardly, and then Rosamund—with a small, sniffling laugh into that circle made up of herself and her sisters—Rosamund said, “Listen, the worst is over now that you've told them. So—just stay here and think and I'll try to calm them down, okay?”

After Rosamund left the room, Martie curled up on the bed and stuck an edge of the corduroy spread into her mouth and began to chew on it. “I need a cigarette,” she said.

Franny stroked Martie's hair. “At the library,” she said, “I looked at some pictures of babies developing inside their mothers—”

“Sh.” Martie lifted her head from the mattress. “It's quiet down there.” She settled her head on the mattress once more. “Roz was great, wasn't she?”

Franny nodded. “But you ought to do what you want to do, you know, Martie?”

“I know. In the beginning, I prayed and prayed I wasn't pregnant. Then, when I knew I was, I told the guy. I won't tell you what he said, the bastard.”

Franny nodded. “That's fine.”

“Unless you really want to know.”

“No,” Franny said.

Martie waved a hand in the air. “You can guess, right? Like, he was the only one I'd ever done it with, but he was, like, ‘If you did it with me, I bet you did it with other guys.'”

“Not very original,” Franny said, and then Rosamund's footsteps sounded on the stairs, and she returned to report that she had told Brick and Peg that Martie was too young to be a mother, and that the pregnancy had only occurred because Martie got tipsy on spiked punch—

“I got tipsy on spiked punch?” Martie made a face.

“Since they don't like your drinking, I made it a spiked punch. Anyway, they agree it would be best if you ended the pregnancy. And they're willing to help out and, after, to act as if it never happened.”
Rosamund lifted a finger in the air: Wait. “And remember: Whoever the guy is, it's better they don't know. That way he doesn't need to exist for them.”

Martie rolled off the bed and went to stand before the dressing table. “Look.” She pulled up her big sweater to examine the minor bulge of her belly in her jeans. Head-on, then profile. “So”—she dropped the sweater—“I get to be a virgin again, huh?”

Rosamund turned toward the door. “They're coming.”

Brick made his way through the suitcases that Rosamund had strewn on the floor and he laid a hand on Martie's shoulder. “Rozzie talked to us, and—we're willing to agree this never happened if you are.” He began to cry, then, ripping sobs, terrible sounds, and Peg added in a small, bleating voice, “If anybody asks, we'll say we don't know what they're talking about. And we won't, right, Brick?”

While the three of them cried and embraced and kissed each other and Martie said that she was sorry, so sorry, Rosamund set her arm around Franny's waist and whispered in her ear, “You should have told me, though. You know that, right?”

O
UTWARDLY, THAT
T
HANKSGIVING DAY DID NOT APPEAR SO
different from any other Thanksgiving. The usual din of the football game filled the house before the family drove to Charlotte Wahl's, and then it filled Charlotte's house once Brick entered her den and turned on her television.

In Charlotte's big, white kitchen, Rosamund and Martie got into a typical debate, this one about war resistance, and who could claim more authority, and Charlotte and Peg discussed the turkey. Should it stay in a while longer? Begin the half-hour sit?

Franny had taken up a post by the bay window where her grandmother now directed her attention to the cedar waxwings feeding in the crab apple tree.

“Wow,” Franny said once she found the birds in the binoculars, and Charlotte gave her a pat on the shoulder before going back to Peg at the oven.

It seemed to Franny that, upon her family's entering Charlotte's house, Charlotte had given Martie's belly exactly the same sort of furtive look that Franny had given it the night before. So Charlotte knew? And also knew that something had been decided?

Would Franny's father have told Charlotte such a thing?

Franny had no idea.

Earlier that morning, when she had gone downstairs, she found Peg and Brick and Rosamund seated at the breakfast table in a whispered conversation that stopped entirely when Franny reached the landing.

“Martie?” Peg asked.

“Franny,” Franny said, and pushed aside the blanket covering the entry. “Martie's still asleep.”

Peg nodded, then continued, “Anyway, I've worried she was oversexed ever since that Roger Dale.”

“Oh, Mom,” Franny protested, but Brick wagged the piece of toast in his hand her way. “Like it or not, some women are.”

“It's true,” Rosamund said. “There's even a name for it, Franny: ‘nymphomaniac.' Still”—she turned to Brick and Peg—“I never thought she'd put you two through something so awful.”

“We didn't either, dear,” Brick said. “Let's hope she can act more ladylike in the future.”

Franny had wanted to run upstairs, then, and tell Martie not to do it, they were tricking her with their hugs and forgiveness, but what was the use? Martie probably
was
too young to be any sort of mother. Too young, too irresponsible. Still, when Franny finally heard Martie start to move around upstairs, she did go to talk to her.

“Martie,” she said—this was in the bathroom, where Martie was slowly brushing her teeth, staring in the mirror at her punchy reflection—“you're sure you want to do this thing, Martie?”

“God, Franny!” Martie spit into the sink. “You're not going to
ruin
this for me, are you? Dad and I sat up talking till two this morning. It was great. When'd he ever do that before?” Martie massaged her temples. “Which is not to say I don't feel like shit from all the scotch we drank.”

“But, Martie, you were looking forward to the baby, weren't you?”

“Water, water.” Martie ducked her mouth under the tap and drank and drank. “I can have babies later,” she said when she raised her mouth from the sink. “Oh, and Dad said he and I might end up going to Mexico to do the thing. Roz knows some people who've gone there. Wouldn't that be cool? Mexico?”

She seemed so hopeful, Franny had to nod yes. “Martie,” she said, “did you tell Deedee?”

“Of course I told Deedee.”

“Did you tell her who the father was?”

Martie set her hands on her hips and laughed. “It could only have been
one
person, Franny. Don't you know—”

“Don't tell me!” Franny closed her eyes and covered her ears and hummed. “I don't want to know. Please.”

“God”—Martie flung open the bathroom door, which bounced against the hall wall with a great bang—“don't be thirteen, okay, Fran?”

“Fourteen,” Franny muttered. “I turned fourteen over three weeks ago. You just forgot.”

“Franny,” Charlotte Wahl said, “if you see that darned squirrel, rap on the glass! It's eating me out of house and home!”

Franny knocked on the glass. The handsome squirrel, so delicately stashing rude amounts of sunflower seeds into its bulging cheeks, seemed not to notice Franny's knocking, but the birds nearby flew off and even some of the waxwings left the crabapple tree across the yard. It was while following the waxwings' flight that Franny saw the brown and white Ford pull up to her grandmother's curb.

Immediately, she left the kitchen. Maybe she was in a dream? No. Because when she stepped out into the front hall, there was her father, coming from the den, empty glass in hand.

“It seems we have visitors,” he said as the doorbell began to ring, and then he made a neat left turn into the foyer.

The wooden door opened with its usual
whiff.
The storm door squeaked. Shoes scuffed the mat in the foyer.

“Hello, hello,” her father said with no evidence of rancor. “You come by to watch a little football with me?”

At that low murmur of reply, Franny could wait no longer and she stepped toward the foyer—just as Tim Gleason stepped out from the foyer and into the front hall.

“Franny,” he said. His hair was much longer than she had ever seen it. He had lost his summer tan and looked as pale as a blanched almond. “Just saw your car out front,” he said, perhaps more to
Brick than to Franny. “Thought I'd say hi to Roz. If she's around.”

“She is, indeed,” Brick said, as if nothing in the world pleased him more than going to fetch Rosamund for Tim Gleason. “I'll tell her you're here!”

Franny waited until Brick had moved down the hall and out of sight before she asked, “So how's Ryan, Tim?”

Tim Gleason nodded. “He's okay.”

“When I saw the car—”

“I just borrowed it. It's smart you guys aren't seeing each other. It's better for both of you.”

She hoped he would say more—just more words, anything connected to Ryan would be something, but he looked away from her and touched a finger to the sleeve of a porcelain statue that Charlotte Wahl always kept on her hall bureau. The statue depicted a Chinese courtesan with flowing robes, plump lips, minuscule fingers. Years ago, Franny had accidentally broken one of the statue's delicate hands and all five tapering fingers. A disaster, she thought, but her grandmother had done such a fine job of putting the tiny bits back together that, for years, no one would have guessed that the hand had been broken at all, and now that the glue had darkened with time, the mends appeared a minute and charming glove of brown lace.

“Say, Timmy?” Brick stepped out into the hall. Gave his nose a back and forth rub—the way he often did when feeling flustered or awkward. “I didn't realize, but Roz went out on an errand. I'm sorry.”

Franny did not care if Tim Gleason did not want her to walk him out to the Ford. “I just want to see the car,” she said, “for old times' sake.”

She let her hand trail along the front fender, which was dusty, as if the car recently had been out on country roads. She cupped her hand around the curve of the side mirror. He would have touched that, making adjustments, looking at himself. His face had been there. Think of that. Again and again. She sneaked a peek at herself
in that mirror. A pretty girl? An ugly girl? She did not know.

Tim Gleason opened the driver's door and climbed inside. “Well,” he said, “tell your big sister happy Thanksgiving.”

“But, wait. Just—”

On the dusty driver's window, with her finger, she wrote:

Tim Gleason squinted at the words—backward for him—then shook his head. Maybe he was disgusted, maybe he was amused, or a little of both. “You don't give up, do you?” he said.

She shrugged. “Tell him I said hi.”

He closed the car door, then, but she knocked on it, and held up a finger—wait—and she changed the
s
in her sentence to a d, which made it a fiction, but sometimes, she knew, by writing down a thing, you could make it true. Or alter its power. Or even change it into something else.

“'Bye, then,” she said.

She watched the car start up the road. It seemed almost as if something could happen—something like the
d
replacing the
s
—so that Tim Gleason could become Ryan Marvell, and that change would mean another change in which the car might drive toward her instead of away from her. Stop, instead of moving on.

But she was thinking of miracles again, wasn't she?

She started back to the house. Just out of sight of the bay window, her grandmother kept bags of birdseed in a covered trash pail. Sunflower and black niger and millet. Franny took one handful of the sunflower seeds and one of the millet and she laid them out on the top bar of the pretty fence that ran around her grandmother's yard. A “rill” of seeds, she thought. The visit from Tim Gleason had left her vibrating. Like a violin string or a tuning fork or a piece of old glass. Hmm, she sang.
Hmm
—to see if her voice carried the vibration, and she thought that it did.

The rest of them stood in the kitchen when she went back inside. Brick opened a bottle of wine while Martie cut the turkey
with the electric knife and Rosamund and Peg and Charlotte transferred pots of vegetables and things into serving bowls and carried them out to the dining room. They all seemed quite jolly.

“Tim said hello,” Franny told Rosamund.

“Hello,” Rosamund said as she rapped a spoonful of stuffing into its dish.

“Grandma,” Franny said—blurted out, really—and, on impulse, she grabbed Charlotte Wahl's dry old hand. “I want to ask you—I'd like to ask if I can use my college money now. To go to Bell Academy for Girls in Des Moines.”

Peg had just started for the dining room with her dish of potatoes, but she stopped and said, “What are you talking about?”

“It's what I'd like to do,” Franny said. “I thought I'd ask Grandma. Since I don't think—I'm getting a good education. Here. In Pynch Lake.”

“It was good enough for your sisters,” Peg said.

“And your father,” said Brick.

“Maybe it's changed, though.” Franny did her best to look each of them in the eye. “Or I just want something different. And I think if I went to a good school, I could get a college scholarship.”

“I know something about Bell,” Charlotte said. “The Heberlings sent their daughter there, and the Nelson girl went there, too. There's no question that it's a good school.”

“Did she talk about this with you?” Brick asked Peg.

“Not a word,” Peg said.

“Is that why you spent so much time at the library this fall?” Charlotte asked Franny. “Trying to get a better education?”

Franny looked down without answering, uncertain if her grandmother were teasing or not.

“Well, I applaud her initiative,” Charlotte said to Brick.

“Me, too.” Rosamund hesitated, then gave a meaningful look to both of her parents before adding, “I think it'd be good for her to get out of Pynch Lake. And go to an all-girls school.”

“But, when were you thinking of doing this, honey?” Brick asked.

“Now. As soon as possible.”

“Now?”
said Peg.

Brick smoothed his hand down Peg's back. “Obviously, it's something we'll have to give some thought to. We're not going to decide anything while we're putting the dinner on the table.”

Peg nodded, then, and carried the casserole dish into the dining room, but Franny stayed behind long enough to whisper to her grandmother, “I brought the brochures. I can show them to you after we eat.”

Later that afternoon, when Brick started to pull into Charlotte's drive in order to turn the car around for the trip home, Martie asked, oh, please, couldn't they take the long way home? Drive the rest of the way around the lake? So she and Rosamund could see the old house and the high school and all?

“Why not?” said Peg, and so Brick backed the car out the same way that it had come and the Wildcat continued on up Lakeside Drive toward the business district.

“Coming up on City Park,” Martie announced.

Franny pitied the band shell, its ugly plaster so exposed now that the trees were bare.

“Scoop the loop, Dad!” Martie said. Brick groaned a little, but then he drove up Clay, past his offices, and turned down Main, which was perfectly empty except for themselves and a VW bug that waited at a red light. The Hamm's beer sign in the window of Viccio's had been turned off for the holiday and, for all the life that the pool hall showed, the place looked as if it might have gone out of business.

“There's the Maid-Rite!” Martie said. “There's Drew's and the hardware store and Spragues'!”

“Did you think they might have gotten up and run away?” Brick asked, and everyone laughed, but Franny knew what Martie meant by her surprise. She felt it herself every time she went down the street, or anywhere else for that matter: amazed. Amazed at being alive.

Lights shone in a few of the apartment windows of The Elgin but the only shop on Main with its sign burning was the one that hung in the cobbler's window: a work shoe with a red neon wing attached. “You don't suppose old Elliot's in there, cobbling, do you?” Brick asked, but the shop itself was dark and surely empty.

They drove past the high school and the Romero Ballroom—and the Top Hat Club, though nobody mentioned that. They drove past the old house on Ash Street and Peg gasped at the children playing in the tree house that her own children had built.

“It's lasted pretty well,” Brick said.

“I can't bear to look,” Peg said, her face turned aside. “I could never bear to look when you kids were up there.”