The After Party (24 page)

If you ignored the fact of the feeding tube, the baby looked like any other baby. Nobody used Joan's name in the hospital; it became clear, after a while, that the doctors and the nurses didn't know it. There seemed to be an arrangement. Joan wasn't really there. She wasn't an unwed mother. She certainly wasn't the mother of a damaged child. She was no one.

Joan thought of California, of how the baby would feel the warmth of the pretty sun on his small cheek. Before she knew it, her plans included this tiny infant.

Mary came after Joan had been in the hospital for nearly two weeks. Joan woke and found her standing over the bassinet. The baby had been brought in from the nursery, for Mary. Joan felt a surge of terror so intense she thought she might vomit.

“She told me he was beautiful. At first it seemed like she might let me keep him. But I was wrong. She told me he would go to a
home. ‘The best money could buy.' I told her no.” She laughed. “She wasn't used to me telling her no. To anyone telling her no. She went back to Evergreen. I knew I hadn't won the war. Only the battle.”

Mary installed Joan in a furnished apartment in an old neighborhood in Dallas, near the hospital. The neighborhood was pretty, gracious. The houses, including Joan's small apartment, red brick, with neat lawns.

When the doorbell rang her first morning, Joan opened the door to Dorie, a suitcase in her hand. Mary had sent her.

David required round-the-clock care. He was constantly uncomfortable. When he was held, he arched his back, wailed. But when he was set down he seemed bereft. He cried then, too. No surface—not the soft mattress of his crib, not his mother's arms—could make David comfortable. His left side was so stiff it seemed made of wood.

“One night I took him in the bath with me, because I didn't know what else to do. He stopped crying, immediately. I felt happier than I'd ever felt. I spent hours with him, in the bath. He loved the water.”

“Like his mother,” I said.

Joan and Dorie took turns with David. Joan could see that Dorie loved David. He was impossible not to love, this helpless, rigid child with her father's features. She'd written
Furlow
as his middle name on his birth certificate. She'd known Mary would not approve and she had done it anyway.

Joan had spent her pregnancy imagining herself into another life. Now it seemed impossible. She was never going to go to
Hollywood, to Paris, to Istanbul. But perhaps the life she had imagined had always been unlikely, just out of reach, and David had only helped her realize it.

“They were the happiest and saddest months of my life. I lived and breathed according to his needs. My own needs? They disappeared. When it was just me and David, at night, it seemed manageable. When he was calm, when he wasn't in pain, it seemed manageable. After Dorie held him he smelled like her lotion, the same lotion she used when we were children.” Joan smiled. “Right before I left, he could reach up and touch my cheek when I held him. Other times he cried and it seemed like he would never stop. He was in pain and I could not make him feel better. We couldn't spend every waking moment in the bath. I could only wait for him to cry himself to sleep. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he cried for hours, and then my plan seemed inconceivable.”

“What was your plan?” I asked. There was a rustle in the bushes, and Joan startled. “Just a squirrel,” I said. “There's no one here.”

She was exhausted, spent. Telling her story cost her something, just as it cost me something to hear it.

“My plan was to take David and Dorie, if she would come, and go somewhere else. Raise David on my own. Are you wondering how I could imagine I was capable of being David's mother?” She practically spat the words.

“No,” I said. “You were his mother.”

She shook her head. “He deserved better. I tricked myself into believing that I could raise him. Mama left us alone those three months. She had to pretend I was in Hollywood. She could tell
Daddy nothing. It was a mercy. It meant she couldn't get away to see us. She called, but it was a party line, so she had to be careful about what she said. She wrote letters, but I refused to read them. And then, one day she came again, when David was thirteen weeks old. I told her I didn't need her. I told her I would take David and live on my own, far away from her. From Houston. I told her to leave, to never come back.”

I thought of that long year. Mary had lied to me, to her husband, to everyone about where Joan was. In retrospect, it did not seem possible, that we had believed her. It did not seem possible, that no one had found her out, had glimpsed Joan in Plano or Dallas, had put two and two together. And yet.

“That's when Mama told me that I had no money. At first I didn't believe it. Daddy would never leave me without money. But Mama told him that was the only way I would come back from Hollywood. She's a smart one, Mama. I could have all the money in the world as long as I did what she wanted.”

Joan was astounded.
I
was astounded, listening to her. Furlow Fortier was one of the richest men in Texas. They had so much money Joan never had to think about it, which she would later understand was the truest sign of wealth.

That day, Mary was dressed in her usual uniform: a slim-fitting skirt, a crisply ironed shirt. The drive from Houston had not rumpled her clothes. Nothing rumpled her mother, Joan realized. Nothing interfered with her plans.

“Sometimes I couldn't make myself believe something was wrong with him. It seems so silly. But so much about caring for him was normal. You would know, with Tommy.”

She gave me a desperate look. I tried not to cry.

“David dirtied his diapers. He was calmed by my touch. I wanted to tell my mother this, but she didn't give me a chance. She repeated what the doctors said. That David would never talk, would never walk or crawl. Would never achieve intelligence. Would likely die before his first birthday. I felt like my skin was being peeled from my body as I listened. I thought of all the things I bought, each week. Dorie, for one. She would need to be paid. Groceries. The doctors. All of this required money. I saw that there were two worlds: One for those with money. One for those without.” She laughed. “I had always taken it for granted that I belonged to the former. But I didn't, not truly. Not like you.”

“I would have traded the money in an instant for a mother who loved me. For parents who stayed put.”

Joan nodded. “I know you would have. And that's the difference between us, Cee.” She plucked a piece of grass from the ground, twirled it between her fingers. “My mother was going to come back the next day, to take David away. Before she left she hugged me. She told me to trust her. I was going to go back to Houston with her. Have a grand homecoming.” She smiled. “For a minute I thought about fighting her. I could take him, money or no money. I could make a life for us. If I'd been a different kind of person, a better person, I might have.

“I left that night. I took three hundred dollars from Mama's purse, and a suitcase of clothes. Dorie was with David. I could hear her, singing to him, as I passed by his door.” She paused. “Leaving was easy. The easiest thing I've ever done.”

“I don't believe you,” I said, quietly.

“It's true. Afterward it was awful. But when I left that tiny apartment I felt—how can I explain it?” She gave me a pleading look. “It felt like I was shedding a second skin. It had become so hard, Cece. And it was only going to get harder. David was only going to get bigger. I knew every crack in the ceiling of that apartment, every loose floorboard, every scuff on the wall. I had never lived in a place so small. Mama made everything clear: I wasn't meant to raise a child like David. I wasn't meant to raise any child. And she was right. So I left. I should have left with David. I should have fought. I didn't. It was a relief, to leave.”

“Maybe you left so you wouldn't have to say good-bye to him.”

“No.” Her voice was firm. “That's not why. I know you can't fathom it: Leaving your child. Being glad to leave him. It's another way we're different. Some women are meant to be mothers. I was glad to leave him, Cece.”

“But you wanted to raise him?” I asked, confused.

“I did!” she cried. “I did. I wanted both things. I wanted to raise him and leave him. I left. Like I said, I wasn't meant to be a mother.”

I thought of my own mother. “What
are
you meant to be?”

Joan shook her head. “I don't know.”

At the bus depot Joan bought a ticket to Amarillo. It seemed as good a place as any.

David seemed very far away. Her breasts ached, the way they did when David cried, though Joan had never fed the child from her breast. But then the ache disappeared, and Joan slept. And slept, and slept.

When she woke she was in Amarillo. She got off the bus,
decided that this city was too big. Mary might look for her there. So she bought another ticket, to a smaller city nearby: Hereford. No one would look for her there, she was sure.

“Everyone thought I was in Hollywood. Instead, I was in the least glamorous place in the world. Everything was painted green. I didn't understand why, at first. But then I figured it out. It was the color of money.”

Hereford was surrounded by feedlots. She could smell it before she saw it.
Beef Capital of the World
, read a cow-shaped sign. There were thousands of cows, as far as the eye could see. No, Mary would not think to look for her there.

Joan was grateful for Texas's expansiveness. The sheer size of it. She pressed her forehead to the window and tried to see beyond the cows, beyond the feedlots. Tried to see her way into another life.

“I stood in the bus depot. And that was when I decided.”

“What did you decide?”

“That I would trust no one. I went from the bus station to a diner. I drank coffee. As I was leaving, I saw a
Help Wanted
sign, and I asked the waitress if I could see the boss. She laughed in my face. She touched the sleeve of my coat and told me I might get it dirty. Do you remember that white coat? I wore it that year, before I left.”

“Cashmere, with pearl buttons.”

“And a fur collar. It probably cost more than that waitress made in a year. Five years.”

She had never felt contempt like that. Joan was no one, nobody, never had been, never would be. In Houston her father's money
had made her someone. And now that was gone, and Joan felt her place in the world shift, fundamentally.

Mary would know she was gone by now. David would be on his way to a home. Joan was worth nothing. Less than nothing.

“It was easy to rent a room. I got into the bed and I slept, and slept, and slept. I didn't even take my clothes off. I only woke up to get water from the bathroom. And then I woke up to a knock at the door. I opened it. I thought it might be Mama; I thought she might have found me. But it was a tall man.”

There were four rooms in the boardinghouse, and Sid lived in one. The other two were occupied by farmers, men who worked long hours and kept their heads down at mealtimes.

Sid was clearly not a farmer. Joan wasn't quite sure what he was. He told Joan he was in town to see about some cattle. He wasn't wealthy—that much was clear, or he wouldn't have been living in the same boardinghouse as Joan—but he seemed like the kind of man who was destined for money. Joan had known men like that all her life, driven men, men who were powerful even before the world had given them power. It was easy to recognize Sid as one of them.

That first week, they established a routine: Joan slept until lunchtime. They ate their sandwiches together. Mrs. Bader, the boardinghouse mistress, left out cold cuts, bread, pickles. A plate of oatmeal cookies for dessert. Sometimes they took their sandwiches outside, and sat on the front lawn. Mrs. Bader's house was another rambling Victorian, like the home for unwed mothers had been, and for the rest of her life Joan hated the sight of an old Victorian. She did not find them gracious, nor elegant.

“I had paid for two weeks. And when I went to pay for the next two, Mrs. Bader had left me a note, telling me Sid had taken care of it.”

She didn't want it to be so simple: Life was easier, with money. Life was easier, with someone to take care of you. And yet she understood that it was that simple. If she wanted to leave Houston forever, she could have a life like the waitress, work her fingers to the bone, never get ahead, never achieve any measure of comfort. Or she could let men like Sidney Stark take care of her.

Joan wished for nothing now. She had stopped wishing once David was born and she understood that he was damaged. Another girl in her situation might have prayed, might have wished away his impairments. But Joan did not have that kind of hope in her any longer. She never would again.

So she let Sid Stark take care of her. She never got a job, never experienced the working woman's travails. She never knew the pleasures of earning a paycheck. Of being independent. None of us did, of course. Joan was no different in that way. But she came so close. And she wanted it so fiercely. Listening to her, I wondered whether, if Sid had not appeared, she might have led a different sort of life altogether. She might have fought harder. She might have found a way.

But Joan didn't think so. Joan knew that if Sid had not come to her room that night, she would have simply disappeared. Not eaten, not left her room, not made any contact with the world outside the boardinghouse. It would have been easy, to disappear. She wanted to, in a way.

That night, after Mrs. Bader had returned the money, Joan
went to Sid's bedroom, which she had never done before. He had always come to her.

“I had sex with him. It was the first time.”

I did not understand. “The first time?”

“Since David's birth. I thought it would hurt. I'd expected pain. I'd
wanted
pain.” I thought of how I had dug my fingernails into my cheeks the night Joan had left, seven years ago; how the pain had seemed right. “But it didn't hurt. It felt like he was erasing David. I lay there beneath him and thought of how my baby was disappearing.”