The Good Daughters (25 page)

Matchless Sweetness

A
FULL FIVE
years after I’d submitted my registration application, a letter arrived from the horticulture department at the university.

After all the years of work it was almost anticlimactic to finally get the news that our new strawberry variety had been approved and now qualified for a patent. The board would be happy to refer me to an expert in the field of horticultural law (who would have known such a field existed?) for the purpose of “pursuing a possible sale of rights to propagate and sell the breed.” For the moment, my strawberry was known as
Fragaria
S–4762, but I was free to provide a name of my choice for future identification of my strawberry variety.

Not right away, but some time after this—when the contract had been signed and the paperwork and testing completed, the Ernie’s A-1 Seed Company purchased exclusive rights to feature an exciting new variety of strawberry plant in its next season’s catalog. Boasting a rating of four stars, with a particular recommendation for growers in the northeastern part of the country, the berry was described as not overly large in size, but possessing a matchless sweetness. I named the strain Clarice.

AN ODD THING HAPPENED WHEN
I was driving my truck to Burlington, Vermont—the headquarters of Ernie’s Seeds—to sign the final paperwork. I had the radio tuned to a country station that morning. I was thinking about Clarice, of course, who had a weakness for that brand of music. I dismissed most of it as incredibly sappy.

A song came on that I recognized, or half recognized. It was a duet between a couple of female singers whose intermingled voices had the effect of sounding like a couple of angels. Suddenly I found myself singing along with this song. Not only that, but I was weirdly able to anticipate the next line before it was sung.

At first I thought it must have been one of Clarice’s favorites, something I’d heard time and again and never really gave much thought to. Then with a shock I realized: it was
George’s
song. Who knew by what odd route it had made its way into the hands of this duo, whose names I didn’t even know, though evidently many others did. The station was playing “the country countdown.” The song was a hit.

I suppose I could have pursued this. Maybe I could have sued someone and made a bundle. But I chose to let it go. I was picking up a big check that day for work of my own creation—mine, and that of the man I now knew to be my true father. This was enough.

What Happened

A
FTER I LEARNED
from Nancy Edmunds’s letter about the secret that had transformed and haunted my family, it had proved surprisingly easy to see myself as the daughter of Valerie Dickerson. No doubt this was made easier by the fact that Connie had never acted like my mother anyway. There was some comfort, actually, in finally understanding why.

The harder part was viewing George Dickerson as my true father. Not only because George had been such a cipher. More so, though, because I adored the man who raised me, Edwin Plank. And so, whatever the DNA might tell me, I knew that for me, Edwin would always be the person I thought of as my father.

Most days when I visited him at the nursing home, he would say almost nothing, and what he did say to me seldom made any sense. If the weather was nice, we might walk around the grounds of the nursing home, not that there was much to see. A few straggling geraniums. A little patchy grass.

Who knows why it was different that day, but I recognized this the moment I walked in the door—a kind of alertness in his expression I had
not seen in years. His eyes, which for some time now had looked at me with nothing but blankness, were focused and clear, and a little moist, as if he’d been crying.

Things were different for me, too. A week earlier, I had opened Nancy Edmunds’s letter and learned the news that Dana Dickerson and I had been sent home from the hospital with the wrong families. And that my father had known all along. For seven days now, I had been trying to make sense of what this meant for my life. Who might I have been if not for my family’s unlikely and disastrous intersection with the Dickersons?

I had been thinking about writing a letter to Dana. I knew she had a goat farm in Maine. It would be easy enough to get her address. I just wasn’t ready yet to talk about what happened.

Meanwhile, here I was at my usual Wednesday afternoon visit with my father. I don’t know what it was about that day that made my father view me as he did then. My hair was loose rather than pinned up as I normally wore it, and I was wearing a dress. Or maybe it was just that I happened to catch him in a rare moment of reflection.

Seeing me as I walked into his room that day, my father looked up from his chair and for the first time within recent memory, smiled.

“It’s about time you came,” he said. “I kept wondering where you’d got to.”

“I was here last week, Dad,” I said, but he didn’t seem to be listening.

“You were right about that music,” he said. “That Peggy Lee knows how to sing them.”

“I brought you a tomato,” I told him. “I’ve had my eye on this one for a couple of weeks now, with you in mind.”

“You don’t have to bring me a thing, sweetheart,” he said. “Just yourself.”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed now. He was propped up with a pillow, his hair white as the fluff on a baby chick. With surprising force and energy he pulled himself up and reached out so his hand brushed my cheek in a way he’d never done before. The way a man does with a woman, not his daughter. It came to me then: he thought I was someone else.

“You’re still a beauty,” he said. “That never changes. You’re wearing your hair the way I like it.”

I sat there. I had no words for him. I wanted to hear this and I didn’t.

“What happened, Edwin?” I asked him. “How did Ruth end up coming home with you and Connie? And Dana went to—” For a moment I could not finish the sentence, knowing who my father believed me to be. “To Val,” I said.

We sat in silence for a long time then, me facing my father, him gazing out the window, his thoughts seemingly off in some other place I could only guess at. Studying his face, that I loved so well in spite of everything, it was almost as if I were watching a hint of changing weather roll in over the horizon—clouds gathering, and the sun disappearing behind them, the first signs of rain.

“What happened. What happened,” he said, shaking his head. The way he said the words, they were less a question than a statement. Watching him, I was reminded of all the times he’d pushed on our heavy barn door to open it.

I waited.

One part of the answer I would never know, of course, and it was likely my father didn’t know it either. The name of the nurse who put one baby in the bassinet with the other one’s name on it. The precise event—diaper change? feeding time? bath?—that was both so small and so large as to change all our lives forever. It didn’t even matter anymore, when you got down to it.

The part I wanted to understand came after, when my father—my father alone, among the four people named on our birth certificates as parents—had chosen to keep me on that farm, and to leave his real daughter, Dana, with the Dickersons. I sensed the moment had come when he might finally be able to tell me. It was unlikely there’d be another.

“What about the babies, Edwin?” I asked him. “The girls.”

“Oh, darling, our girls,” he said. He let out the longest sigh. “Please forgive me.” His hands, that had laid the seeds in miles of rows all those years and tended the plants those seeds became, were trembling.

“I’m trying to understand,” I told him. “When you found out what had happened, why didn’t you do something about it?”

“It was an accident, the two of them getting switched like that,” he said. “I never expected such a thing. But when Connie realized and told me we had to call the hospital and fix things, I just thought, maybe it’s supposed to be this way. I knew I’d love the girl we brought home, because she was yours.”

“What are you talking about, Edwin?” I told him. I understood now, I was Valerie. At least, it was Valerie to whom my father spoke. But I didn’t understand why he was so sure he’d love her baby.

He didn’t answer my question. He continued as if I hadn’t said anything.

“It wasn’t fair to you or Connie,” he said. “Or the girls, of course. Or any of us, probably. I just let my heart get the best of me.”

“You mean taking Ruth?” I said to him then. “Instead of Dana?”

“They were both my girls, was the thing,” he said. “Either way you sliced it, I was going to be one daughter short. I just wanted that little reminder of you. I wanted my little Beanpole.”

My father was crying now. This was the kind of moment they told you at the nursing home you were supposed to call an aide to come and give your loved one a sedative. I could push the button and in five minutes, he’d be snoring. Then I’d never know.

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said, holding his hand. “Start from the beginning, Edwin.”

Then finally, it was as if the door swung open at last, and we stepped into our old barn.

He sat up. His eyes seemed to focus then, though not on anything in the room. It was as if he was watching a scene in a movie, only a movie that was playing inside his head. I wasn’t Ruth anymore, or Valerie either. To my father, I doubt anybody was even there. But he must have needed to tell the story, finally, if only to the four walls of his room. And so—for the first time, and the last—he did.

Lucky You Came Along

It was only the second hurricane of the season, and you could tell from the way it came on—fast and dark—this one was going to be a doozy. It was October, so we didn’t have to worry much about the crops—just the pumpkins in the field, but back in those days we weren’t doing a big business in pumpkins yet. If I had a worry, it was the barn roof, and a certain stand of hickory up along the far edge of the property, where the strawberries were planted.

We were young then, Connie no more than twenty-six, me just past thirty, but I had the weight of the world on my shoulders: two hundred acres to tend and four girls to keep fed—whippersnappers, the oldest of them not even six years old, the youngest on the bottle. And a good wife, though not the kind to keep the bed warm, summer nights or winter.

It was supposed to be the first game of the Series that night, but I knew the power would likely go out before the game got started. The Yanks versus the Dodgers. The Sox had folded as usual in September. Some things you can count on, regular as rain, and that was one of them.

Connie was bringing in the laundry when the call came. It was the
dispatcher on the line—ten more minutes and she wouldn’t have gotten through. There was a tree down on the old County Road, and me being head of the volunteer firemen, it was my job to take care of it. I threw on my slicker and hopped in the truck, told Connie not to wait up, though I had been thinking before the call came that maybe with the storm and all, I’d get lucky with my wife that night. It had been months since she’d let me give her more than a peck on the cheek, and I was craving her affection sorely.

So now I’m out on the road, headed toward the spot where the dispatcher told me the downed tree was blocking the bridge. No other vehicle in sight, of course. It’s crazy to be out there. Even my old half-ton feels unsteady in the wind. I can imagine one good gust pushing me over.

Suddenly, up ahead, I can make out a figure in the road—yellow slicker in my headlights. I see a person’s arms waving as the water blows across the road, not even coming down anymore so much as going sideways.

When I get closer, I cut the engine and climb out. Once I get close I can make out that it’s a woman with a child, a boy around the age of one of my girls—four maybe, or five.

“I need help,” she says. “My car went off the road. We can’t see to get home.”

I help them into the truck, the mother and her son. With her hood off now, I recognize her from the times she stopped in at the farm stand that past summer, once for strawberries, another time for corn. I had noticed her all right, with her long blond hair—a tall woman, close to six feet, and beautiful. Her son looks like her. He’s shivering in the seat between us.

“We’re lucky you came along when you did,” she says. “I didn’t know what we were going to do.”

We make it to her house, just barely—though I stop on the way, to take out my chain saw and move the fallen tree. I’m soaked through, of course. Water in my boots even. My hands so numb I can barely work the saw, but I manage.

No lights on inside her house. The power’s out.

“Your husband will be worried,” I say.

“Not likely. He’s on a trip,” she says. “He never worries like that, anyway.”

She invites me in then. “You should dry off,” she says. “I’ll give you a shot of whiskey. George keeps a bottle on hand.”

I don’t drink as a rule, or rather, Connie doesn’t like me to, but I follow the woman in. I think back on the time I saw her at our farm stand and how, after she bought her corn, Connie had watched her go, then commented how odd it was that a woman her age would still wear a ponytail. And I remember thinking to myself that I liked it.

We’re standing in the kitchen now. The boy has run upstairs with a flashlight in search of dry clothes, but me and the woman are still standing there in our wet clothes, the water forming pools around our feet on the linoleum.

Then comes a cracking sound, louder even than anything the storm has produced so far. It’s a crash like the end of the world, or close, and when I open the door I can just make out a tree broken in two—the big old elm in the front yard that had been swaying as we pulled up.

Now there’s branches covering the house. The trunk is severed—not clean, of course, like if I’d done it with my chain saw, but all jagged. And the top of the tree is lying horizontal over my truck. I’m thinking maybe the vehicle is salvageable but for the moment, there’s no telling. The only thing I know for sure: I’m not going anyplace tonight.

There’s no food in her house. Here’s one more way—one of a million—this gal standing in her kitchen now, soaked to the bone, bears about as much resemblance to my wife as an artichoke to a potato. Connie’s the kind of woman that could feed her family for three months off the contents of her larder, where all this blond stringbean could offer us was a few crackers and a bowl of something I never tasted before: yogurt. And the thing was, I didn’t care. It was nourishment enough, her being there.

She offers me more whiskey. She sets the bottle on the table, next to the candles. We drink from the same glass.

At some point, the son goes up to bed, looking at me sideways as he heads up the stairs. “Who are you, anyway?” he says.

“I’m a fireman,” I tell him, but I can’t blame the boy for wondering. Where’s the uniform, the hose, the truck?

After the boy’s gone, the woman brings out dry clothes for me. A shirt and pants belonging to her husband. No need to go someplace else to change, it’s that dark. The clothes are on the small side, since evidently this husband of hers is considerably shorter than me and less well fed, no doubt. The woman goes upstairs herself for a bit, and when she gets back she has also put on dry clothes—a bathrobe; I can make out there are flowers on it and lace—nothing Connie would wear, and if she did, I have to say, the outfit wouldn’t have the same effect or anything close.

She laughs at the sight of the pants on me, which leave a full six inches of shin and ankle uncovered. “Planks tend to come tall,” I tell her, “although all four of my girls take after their mother in the height department.” After I say this, I’m wishing I hadn’t mentioned my wife, but the woman seems not to notice.

“I think I’ll put on some music,” she says.

“The power’s out, remember?” I tell her. Thinking of how it is at our house, Connie’s and mine, with the radio permanently tuned to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

“We have a Victrola,” she says. “I like the sound of 78s so much better.”

She puts on Peggy Lee. “Bali Ha’i.” That one.

She stands there in the dark room, in the flickering light of a couple of candles burning down to the stubs, with the wind moaning. The rain pounds on the roof. From upstairs, I hear her son calling, “I’m scared.”

“He’s always been afraid of storms,” she says, turning to make her way up the stairs in the darkness.

I tell her I love the rain. “That’s a farmer for you. Always thinking about the crops.”

When she comes down again, to say the boy’s calmed down now, that’s when we dance.