The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (6 page)

“How is Caroline?” Henrietta asked. “I understand working with you has been a real opportunity. Not that I’ve seen her lately.”

“I wouldn’t call it an opportunity. We’re friends, which is a good thing. The fact is,” Kate added, as her martini and Henrietta’s Scotch arrived, “I never expected really to meet you, any more than I expected to come upon two sets of twelve-year-old twins playing volleyball. Or upon Huck and Jim on a raft, if it comes to that. Certain scenes live only in the imagination.”

“The twins are not
that
much younger than you,” Henrietta laughed. “My twins, at least, have turned out rather well. I’ve lost track of the other two, so they remain always twelve in my mind also. They moved away after that summer.”

“I wonder if they tell the story of Caroline’s arrival.”

“I’m pretty sure they do. They got used to telling it that summer. It’s not the sort of story you forget.”

“It’s all passed into legend by now. How does it feel to be part of a legend?”

“It was an amazing moment. I feel a kind of wonder
about Caroline, as though, after that birth, as amazing and as charming in its way as that of Botticelli’s Venus, she was bound to be a marvel, do something that would reverberate, become, in her own way, a myth.”

“The birth of the hero, as Raglan and others have it, only this time a woman hero. More Moses than Eppie in
Silas Marner
. And of course the two sets of twins add a note, a kind of amazing circumstance.”

“Not really,” Henrietta laughed. “Think of the Bobbsey Twins. Just a convenient circumstance.” Henrietta looked for a moment down at her hands. “I do hope Caroline’s stopped brooding about it. I worry about the Rayleys; I worry about her. Like one of those babies conceived
in vitro
: How can anything in life equal its first moment? I mean, can a life hold two miracles?”

“The whole point of heroic lives is that they do, isn’t that so? The miraculous birth, therefore the awful and wonderful destiny. Not that I can imagine that for Caroline, who is such a sane person, which heroes rarely are.”

“Male heroes,” Henrietta said, and they went on to talk of other things.

But, the ice being broken, they met again from time to time, when Henrietta was in New York or Kate in Boston. And then one spring day Kate, finding herself at Williams College and remembering that Henrietta’s country house, on whose lawn Caroline had appeared that long-ago afternoon, was nearby, telephoned on the chance that Henrietta might be there, might ask her to stop by.

“Your sense of geography is rather wonderful,” Henrietta remarked. “I’m an hour at least away, and despite the careful directions I shall now give you, you will get lost. Stop and telephone again when you realize you’ve made a wrong turn. And plan to spend the night if you come at all.
You’ll be far too late to drive anywhere today. I’m all alone, so there’s plenty of room. I’ll put you in the room where I was reading the day Caroline appeared.”

Kate did get lost, did call again, did arrive as the day was darkening, the trees beginning to be outlined against the evening sky. Kate drove down the dirt road on which Henrietta’s house stood, was shown the bushes that lined the property at its sides, and the lawn where the badminton net had been. Beyond the lawn was woods. The silence was amazing to Kate.

“Come in,” Henrietta said. “We’ll sit by the fire and lift a glass to Caroline.”

“Has she been back here often?” Kate asked.

“Oddly not; the Rayleys visited with her once, but they wouldn’t take their eyes off her. I think they feared she would wander off just as she had come, holding out her hands to someone else. It took them years to believe that Caroline was there to stay. They used to go into her room at night to be sure she hadn’t vanished into thin air. Eventually Caroline became a real little girl who could be trusted out on her own. Fortunately, she was small when they got her, so she had time to grow into independence and they had time to accept it. The Rayleys are very sound people, which was a great relief.”

“You knew that when you called them that day?”

“I knew them well, of course. But all I thought of that day was their longing for a child, and the child’s need of a home. I felt, even though I’d just met Caroline, an urgency that she find the right home, not just be adopted by people I’d never heard of, however worthy.”

Kate started to ask another question, but restrained herself. The time for questions had passed; the time for answers might come, but only Henrietta could decide that.
They sat with their drinks in front of the fire and let the evening darken altogether before they turned on the lights and thought about dinner.

“I’ve a thick soup I made last night; it improves with age, like the best women. Will that do? There’s also homemade bread and decent wine.”

“It sounds like the beginning of another fantasy,” Kate said. “I don’t get to the country much, and rarely am offered homemade soup and bread. Mostly I subsist on nouvelle cuisine and fish, neither of which I especially like. When we’re home we eat omelettes or Chinese food, delivered by an intense young person on a bicycle. This is a lovely change. Can we eat in front of the fire, looking like a scene from a made-for-television movie?”

“We are, I fear, insufficiently rustic.”

But nothing else was insufficient. One of those times, Kate thought, when it is all just right, and you never quite understand why, except that it was unplanned and in the highest degree unlikely ever to happen just that way again.

Dinner over, they sat sipping their coffee by the fire, which was dying because Henrietta hesitated to throw on another log: it would commit them to a delayed bedtime. Kate was beyond the most minor decision. It had been a long day, but she was in that odd state of fatigue past weariness. She simply sat. And Henrietta, having, it seemed, decided, threw a large log on the fire.

“I’d better tell you,” she said, sitting forward and staring at the fire. “Someone, I suppose, should know. But if I tell you, it will end our friendship. I’ll trust you, but I won’t want to know you anymore. Which is a pity; the world is not that full of intelligent friends.”

Kate couldn’t argue with the truth of that. “But if I
say don’t tell me, shall we go on being friends? Is it my decision?”

“Probably not,” Henrietta said, sighing. “In telling you there was anything to tell, I’ve already crossed that bridge; I’ve already burned it.”

“It’s ironic,” Kate said. “Like so much else. I guessed, of course–not what you would tell, but that there was something to tell. Once you knew that, we were destined to have only this one night by the fire.”

“Truncated friendships are my fate,” Henrietta said. “As you shall learn. There never is any turning back.” Henrietta paused only a moment.

“It began with a young woman very like Caroline now, a graduate student. We became friends, as you have with Caroline. But it was, or seemed, a more perilous friendship then. Women didn’t become close to one another; their eyes were always on the men. I was an associate professor, rather long in the tooth for that, but women didn’t get promoted very rapidly in those days. We talked, this graduate student and I, about, oh, everything I seemed never to have talked about. Such talk became more ordinary later, with CR groups and all the rest; it’s hard now to recall the loneliness of professional women in those years, the constant tension and anxiety of doing the wrong thing, of offending.

“You have to understand what a conservative woman I was then. If I felt any criticism of the academic world I had fought my way into, I never let it rise to consciousness, let alone expressed it. I just wanted to be accepted, to teach, to write; I liked to tell myself it was simple. And my life was very full. There were the twins; there was my marriage, good then, better now, fine always–we’ve worked on it, examined our assumptions. But to
understand this story you have to imagine yourself back then, back before Betty Friedan described ‘the problem that has no name.’

“I asked my new friend to the country, alone, just as you are here tonight. The children stayed in Boston with their father; he was good about helping me to get away, now and then. And they were all involved in Red Sox games and other things I could never pretend interest in. He thought it might be good for me to talk to someone; ‘girl-talk,’ he called it. None of us had any decent language for women friends.” And Henrietta stopped and began to cry, not loudly, no noise at all. The tears fell silently. “Maybe you can guess the rest,” she said.

Kate nodded. “She misunderstood, or you did. She made what used to be called a ‘pass.’ Today I think they would say she came on to you. Were you terrified?”

“It isn’t even right to call it a pass. It was a gesture of love. I can see that now. Then, I simply went rigid with terror. And that’s what I felt: sheer, paralyzing terror. I knew nothing about women loving women, except that I feared it; we had been taught to fear it. My terror was obvious.”

“And she ran away?”

“No. She didn’t run. We went on with the evening–we’d arrived in late afternoon–we went on with dinner, we ‘made’ conversation. I never really understood the agony of that phrase until then. Somewhere in her diaries Woolf talks of beating up the waves of conversation. We did that. Nothing helped; not wine, not food. We said nothing that mattered. The next morning she was gone.”

“Gone from graduate school too?”

“Yes. I had no idea where she was, or what had become of her. I tried, discreetly of course, to find out, but she
seemed simply to have vanished. The way graduate students do vanish, from time to time. Sometimes they surface again, sometimes not. Once in a while–and this is what terrified me most–they kill themselves.”

“But she went off and had an affair with a man.”

“You seem to know the story. Is it as ordinary as all that?”

“Not a bit. One doesn’t need to be a detective to guess the next step as you tell it. You’ve just kept it a secret so long.”

“It was such a daring plot, you see. I didn’t ever want to wreck the magic of that scene by telling anyone. It succeeded beyond my wildest hopes.”

“You planned it.”

“Of course. She was very clear about not wanting the baby, as she had been clear about having it. A rarely honest woman, for that time. She adored the child, but recognized her impatience, her lack of desire to be a mother, let alone a single mother. She had never told the father she was pregnant; she never told me who he was. I keep saying how different it all was in those days: you have to remember that.

“Caroline was a magic child; that made the plot easier. One of those children who are friendly, open, who greet all the world with delight. I made excuses to visit the country house alone; it wasn’t hard. I had work to do, and my husband knew the summer with the children here and guests was not an easy time for intense work. Caroline was brought here secretly, for a short time each day; I played with her. A game. I was in the house; Caroline was put down by the bushes, and she came toward the house to find me. It’s simple, isn’t it, when you know?”

“Did your husband know?” Kate asked.

“No. I was terribly tempted to tell him, but it was clear he would play his part better if he didn’t know it was a part. His being off the scene was just chance; I didn’t plan that.”

Kate thought about it awhile. “And your friend,” she finally asked, “what became of her?”

“She died. In some freak accident–it was horrible. I heard only later, by chance. All the time she was here with the child, she never melted, never said anything meaningful beyond ‘Help me’ in the beginning, and, just before the end, ‘Goodbye.’ She crept off through the woods as Caroline moved toward the twins.”

“Your plot worked more perfectly than most plots. Like magic.”

“Just like magic. I didn’t even know the Rayleys would be reached immediately that day, would come so soon. That afternoon’s legend has always seemed to me to have some of the qualities of a Homeric hymn. But before and after the afternoon, that’s the sorrow. We never made it up; she never forgave me.”

Kate could find nothing to say except “There’s Caroline.”

“Yes,” Henrietta answered. “And she’s your friend. Neither of you is my friend.”

“That can always change,” Kate said. “Maybe this time, you’ll find the words to change all that.”

“Don’t tell Caroline,” Henrietta said. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“No,” Kate said. “But I shall be breaking a promise to Caroline. I promised to tell her if there was ever an answer. Perhaps one day you will let me keep that promise, or you will keep it for me.”

“Perhaps. But there are no parents for Caroline to find.”

“There is a friendship between two women when that
was rare enough. And there is the magic afternoon. That’s more than most of us begin with.”

Henrietta only shook her head. And after a time, she went to bed, leaving Kate by the fire. In the morning, before Kate left, Henrietta spoke cheerfully of other things. The sun was not yet bright on the lawn as Kate drove away.

M
Y aunt Kate Fansler doesn’t care for children. I’m her niece, but I never really got to know her till we ran into each other when I was a student at Harvard. It’s true my cousin Leo spent a summer with her, and lived with her a year or so when he was in high school, but he wasn’t really a child in high school, and during that summer she had a hired companion for him and sent him to day camp besides. Kate Fansler always refused to become defensive about this. “I don’t much like children,” she admitted. “I know it’s an eccentric attitude, but not a dangerous one. The worst fate I’ve ever inflicted on any child is to avoid it. As it happens, however,” she added, “I did once more or less solve a case for a child. Do you think that will serve to redeem me in the eyes of those with maternal instincts?”