The Road Taken (25 page)

Chapter Thirty

In their brief affair that fall and winter of 1957 and 1958, Trevor was as mesmerized by Joan as a self-involved person like him could be, and she was aware of his melting weakness and it made her more passionate. He was fascinated by the combination of her passion and the obvious fact that she was also detached. He couldn’t find her a threat because she made no demands. Girls always wanted you to say you were in love with them before they would go all the way, and they always professed love for you, but Joan couldn’t be bothered. Yet she was a nice girl, not in any way a slut, and she was faithful to him as best he could tell. This endearing combination of independence and willingness had never happened to him before. In addition, she was pretty and funny, and he was flattered that she liked him. They saw each other as often as they could.

As for Joan, she was much more emotionally involved with him than he would have dreamed. If their affair had not been hopeless, something she wanted only in order to conceive a child, she would have loved him less. She was not ready for love, had not been before the tragedy in the driveway, and certainly not afterward. She looked at Trevor and thought of Ed, she imagined herself sometimes as Peggy, and she knew this charade was doomed. She would get pregnant and slip away, and she could not keep the child. She was a vessel, a convenience, a benefactor for Peggy and Ed, and she knew she would have to remember that.

When she missed her period for an entire month she went to her gynecologist. “You’re pregnant,” he said. He waited to see her reaction because she had told him she was single.

“Good,” Joan said. “My fiancé will be delighted. Now my parents can’t delay the wedding anymore.”

“Then congratulations,” the doctor said, looking considerably relieved. He was a middle-aged man with eyeglasses and iron-gray hair, he had a wife and three children of his own. He did not do illegal abortions, and he did not enjoy sending girls to homes for unmarried mothers because they were always so ashamed and unhappy. A single woman did not keep her baby, even if she could afford to do so. The stigma was too great. He was willing to dispense birth control and fatherly advice, and a girl could pretend to be a virgin forever. But conceiving a baby was the sure sign a girl had been fooling around, and her life, of course, would be henceforth ruined, in one way or another. That was just the way things were.

That night Joan was very kind to Trevor. They cooked dinner together, and when she looked at him her eyes were sad. “I love you,” she allowed herself to say. She didn’t know if it was true.

He looked at her, seeming stunned. Then he smiled. “I love you too,” he said.

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I know.”

The smell of the cooking, even though it was a stew they both liked very much, was making her nauseated. She knew the morning sickness was not far behind. And her breasts seemed to have ballooned overnight; she wondered if Trevor noticed. When he touched them they felt sore. “I’m going to have to go away for a while,” Joan said casually. “My grandfather in California is very sick. Probably dying. After all, he’s ancient. I need to see him and help my mother.”

“How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, give me your number,” Trevor said. “I might have to go to California myself. My agent is setting up some auditions.”

“But I’ll be in Northern California,” Joan said.

“So? We can have a sexy weekend together.”

She smiled. “That sounds irresistible.”

The next day she went out looking for apartments in Brooklyn. She knew nothing about Brooklyn, except that it was another place you could hide in plain sight; across the bridge, near, yet as far away as Nebraska if you didn’t know anyone. She needed a building with less stairs to climb than the tenement she was living in now, because it would be hard when she was large. To her delight the rents were cheaper than in Manhattan, so she was able to get a pleasant, large studio with a view of trees, a few blocks from the park, on the parlor floor of a brownstone building that had once been a private school. In a way it reminded her of home, and Joan felt a flash of homesickness.

She bought a wedding band in the five and ten, and when she filled out the forms for the lease she wrote that she was Mrs. Coleman, a divorcee.

Poor Trevor, she thought, when she had the moving van come for her few things while he was at acting class. Not that he would know she had moved out; the two of them always went to his apartment, not hers. She tacked a note on his door. “Grandpa is worse. I’ll call you when I get to California. Love, always, Joan.”

Working in a restaurant again was out of the question now because every food smell made her need to throw up. After looking for a while, Joan found a job as a salesgirl in a men’s clothing store, selling shirts and ties—things the men didn’t have to try on—in the front room. She supposed when her pregnancy started to show too much she would get fired. Her father was still sending her money, and she knew she could live on that when she had to. She still had to go to Manhattan to her post office box, but Trevor didn’t know about it and never went there, so the chances of his running into her were remote. Knowing she was still so close and yet so distant from everyone she knew gave her a feeling of danger and even power.

She made a few friends in the store, and customers sometimes asked her out, but she usually said no. In any case, she never went out with them more than once or twice, and only for a free meal because she was lonely. “My divorce isn’t final,” she would protest if any of the men she had rejected got persistent. They thought that was an additional attraction, but Joan said, according to her mood that day, that it was too complicated because she and her husband might get together again, or, conversely, that her husband was jealous and having her followed. Eventually, though, she started to look pregnant, and the invitations ceased. She was rather relieved.

She could live in her pregnancy now, following the rhythms of her body, imagining the life growing inside her, feeling it quicken. She bought little maternity outfits with smock tops and holes cut out in the front of the skirts for the burgeoning baby. These ensembles always featured “interest” near the face: a collar or a bow, to detract from what was below. Her social life now consisted of going for her checkups.

She had found a different doctor after she moved to Brooklyn, Dr. Veeder, a soft-spoken and motherly woman obstetrician who believed the revised version of Joan’s situation, which for the doctor’s benefit was that her husband was dead, tragically killed in an auto accident after drinking too much at a bachelor party, right after she had found out she was pregnant. It was best, Joan had decided, to get rid of the fictitious husband, so there would be no one legally responsible for this baby but herself. “What a terrible thing alcohol is,” Joan declared. “I never touch it. I could not have lived with him the way he was. I knew his problem would destroy our marriage someday, but I never knew how quickly.”

Joan liked the idea of a woman doctor; she seemed more sympathetic somehow. During these months of waiting Joan had begun to formulate her plan of how to give her baby to Peggy. It had to be a girl! Joan prayed every night for this baby to be a girl, even though she knew nothing would change if it were a boy. Dr. Veeder, moved by the sad plight of the young, widowed mother, had already agreed to find her a private adoption agency. A small one, Joan stipulated, where in this case the mother could have control over who got the child. What she did not add was that it had to be a place where they would believe the next story, where someone would follow the script she had prepared.

Twisting and turning, changing colors like a chameleon, Joan went through her days; growing bigger, feeling the baby kick now, watching the little lumps its active limbs made on the surface of her belly that was tight as a drum. It was the first time in so very long that she had actually felt happy.

Whoever she said she was, she believed it for that moment. She saw herself as the fiancée planning a shotgun wedding, the deserted wife, the abandoned widow. Joan had hardly ever lied in her life, but now she found the interesting thing about making up these stories about herself was that it was so easy to think they were true. Was this what habitual liars did? Was this why they were so good at it? She had been someone other than herself for quite a while now, and it gave her a rich store of memories that had never happened. The further she could get away from bad Joan the killer, the better she liked it.

She thought about Trevor from time to time. She missed him. He was another doomed part of her past that she had to put away, and she knew that, but it didn’t make her want him less. Maybe some day, when all of this was over, when her family was reunited again and Trevor was, perhaps, a movie star, she would look him up. He would remember her because you always remembered the one who disappeared.

A month before the baby was due, Joan went to the private adoption agency Dr. Veeder had arranged for her. It occupied all of a small brownstone house very much like the one she was renting her own apartment in. Unmarried pregnant girls were living there, hiding, but Joan’s case was different. She was only coming for a meeting. She sat down in the tidy office, across the desk from a thin woman her own mother’s age, named Mrs. Key, who had pale eyes and a surprisingly masculine voice, and was actually wearing a hair net, and began to tell her tale.

“My older sister, Peggy’s, little girl died some time ago,” Joan said. “She never got over it. She can’t have another baby. I know if Peggy knew that I was letting her have my own child she would refuse to take it. She could never understand a sister with so much love, who could make such a sacrifice. But Peggy would be an excellent mother. I’ve seen that already. She has an older child, a boy, who would welcome a new sibling. And she has a wonderful husband, and a home in the suburbs. I want my baby to have all the advantages I can’t give it. I want my baby to stay within my family. I will tell you how to approach my sister and what to do. You’ll have to do exactly as I say. I have to be kept completely out of it. Peggy will be reluctant at first because she’s still grieving. But in the end, everyone will be better off the way I have decided this matter should be resolved.”

“Are you sure you want to do this in secrecy?” Mrs. Key asked.

“Positive. I want the records sealed as usual.”

“Are you sure you can’t keep the baby? It’s all you have left of your late husband.”

“No,” Joan said. “I won’t let him ruin this child’s life from beyond the grave.” That was a little dramatic, but she could see it got results. The woman looked moved.

“Don’t you think your husband’s parents . . . ?”

“They’re the ones who ruined
his
life,” Joan said.

“Ah . . .” She thought for a moment. “Will you ever tell your sister the baby is yours?”

“I don’t know. Maybe later. We’ll see. I want Peggy to think of the child as her own before I do anything like that.”

“This is a very unusual case,” Mrs. Key said. “Not giving the baby into the care of a relative, but the fact that you’re making it a kind of anonymous gift. You must love your sister very much. And your child.”

“Of course I do. And I am going to pay my own medical bills,” Joan said. It would empty her entire savings account to do so, but having Peggy and Ed pay the expenses for a pregnant woman did not fit the scenario she had invented.

Mrs. Key looked surprised, but nodded agreement. It was now clear that Joan could have anything she wanted.

Thanksgiving was coming, but Joan hardly minded that she was alone, that she was unemployed, that she didn’t have friends. She felt almost too big to move. The baby would be her Thanksgiving present. And then, if everything went perfectly, Peggy would have her new baby for Christmas. Joan felt surprisingly serene now that everything was going as she had hoped.

She woke up one morning in agony, gasping. In her world of plans and fantasies, she had been completely unprepared for the reality of labor pains; she felt as if she were being cut by a knife. Why would anyone want to have children? What could she have been thinking of? But in the hospital Dr. Veeder promptly put her to sleep, and when she woke in her hospital room the nurse put a daughter into her arms.

Joan looked down at the pointy comb of white-blonde hair, the little face like a crumpled flower, and felt tears running out of her eyes. This was Marianne, exactly as she had looked when she was an infant. She had done it! She had recreated Marianne. She could hardly believe the miracle of it. Surely she wasn’t such a bad person after all to have been so rewarded.
My baby,
Joan thought, feeling the pull of love and dragging herself out of its orbit, distancing herself.

Now let the drama begin.

Chapter Thirty-One

Peggy had survived Thanksgiving, another long day at her parents’ house pretending to be normal, and now there was Christmas looming ahead. She thought how cruel it was that the autumn months were so filled with holidays that broke your heart. There was Halloween, with the little kids in their costumes, asking for candy, and the picture in her mind and in her photo album of Marianne, dressed as a ballerina princess. There was cheerful Thanksgiving, when Marianne and Peter had brought home from school their drawings of Pilgrims and turkeys. Before she died, Marianne had made her first-ever painting of a turkey that looked like what it was supposed to be. When you had children, every holiday involved seasonal decorations, and crafts—therefore souvenirs, memories.

And almost directly after Thanksgiving had passed there was the planning and purchase of presents, the baking and stockpiling of cookies, which would be devoured, and fruitcakes, which would be ignored, and the children’s letters to Santa. And eventually there would be the adventure to buy the tree. Peggy knew you couldn’t avoid the holiday excitement even when you derided it as being too commercial; it was in the streets, the newspapers, the store windows, it was part of the culture.

Ed had tried a few more times to have sex with her, and then he had stopped. (She did not think of it as making love; it hurt too much.) She knew they were consciously avoiding arguments. She tried to be kind to him, to look and even act in love when she was in a safe and neutral place, with the result that the two of them were like a very old, long-married couple, the kind who surprise you by a lingering stroke, a pat. Peggy had never wondered if Ed still loved her, but now she thought about it. She knew she loved him, but so much about her love had changed. It was pushed aside into the pit of her sorrow.

One day a week before Christmas, there was a phone call. At first Peggy thought it was a man, but the caller introduced herself as Amanda Key, a name that meant nothing to Peggy. “I am a good friend of Dr. Suddrann,” Amanda Key said.

“Who?”

“Sam Suddrann. The doctor who was in the emergency room the day your daughter died.”

Peggy felt a wave of nausea and fear. She didn’t want to remember any more about that day, and had in fact even forgotten the name of the attending doctor, if she had actually known it in that time of blind hysteria. “What do you want?” she said.

“Dr. Suddrann was so moved by your tragedy,” the woman on the phone said. “It was such an unusual thing, and your daughter was an angel. He told me he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Now, you may think this is strange, but I am the director of the Parkway Adoption Agency in Brooklyn, and we have a baby girl here who is the image of your daughter. Her parents were killed in an auto crash, and there are no relatives. The baby was with their neighbor at the time, and thus was spared. What an accident of fate takes away, an accident of fate returns, it seems to me. Perhaps that is too mystical, but in my business one sometimes becomes a philosopher. I don’t know if you have thought of adoption, but I wonder if you would let me send you a photograph of the baby. She’s only a few weeks old.”

“My child was three,” Peggy said coldly. “You have no idea what she looked like as an infant. Is this a crank call?”

“No, no. Dr. Suddrann suggested I telephone you. He thought you and your husband would be perfect parents for this little girl.”

“I don’t want a baby,” Peggy said. “Leave us alone.”

She hung up, and a moment after she did she was a bit sorry. She had actually no idea if she wanted another baby or not. Celia’s words came back to her, and she knew Grandma would be delighted. No, she didn’t want a baby, but who wouldn’t be curious? She was not curious enough, however, to call the woman back. The whole concept was too morbid.

When Peggy told Ed about the strange phone call that night, he looked inscrutable. She had no idea what he was thinking, and despite their closeness from so many years she didn’t want to ask. Either yes or no would be unacceptable to her. The intrusive offer had set her mind going in all sorts of directions: fantasy, reality, practicality, madness. Why would she want to adopt some other people’s child? And yet, the image of a new baby girl arriving in the house from almost nowhere, without thought or planning, an unprotected creature who needed her, had an unexpected emotional pull.

A few days later the envelope arrived in the mail. When Peggy saw the return address she didn’t know whether she wanted to tear the envelope open or toss it away. She hesitated for a moment and then opened it. Inside, folded into a letter, there was a photograph of a baby girl, and when she saw it she felt as if that child’s soul was flowing directly into hers through the child’s eyes, a child she had known all its life, and her hand began to shake so badly she almost dropped the picture. It was Marianne.

“Dear Mrs. Glover,” the letter read. “I feel you and your husband should look at this picture. This orphaned child is meant for you. She will bring a new life to all of you, and you to her. Think about it, and please call me. I would like to make an appointment for you to see her in person. Sincerely, Amanda Key.”

In that instant Peggy’s day was over. She could not think of shopping for Christmas gifts or of wrapping the ones she had, she could hardly greet Peter and his friends when they came rushing through the house shepherded by the indispensable Mrs. McCoo, she was even afraid to answer the phone. She took the photograph of the infant girl into her bedroom and sat on her boudoir chair, holding it in her hands as if the picture were the baby itself.

There you are, Peggy said silently to the infant. How are you? Do you know me? It’s nice to see you again. I missed you so much.

She knew she had to be deranged.

That night she showed the picture to Ed, and when he had seen it he looked up at her with a glance so startled and tragic that Peggy took him into her arms without even thinking about it. “Could we bear to do it?” she said.

“It’s not Marianne,” he said. “Babies change.”

“But by then we would love her,” Peggy said. She even surprised herself.

“Another child in this house would be a good thing,” Ed said slowly. “Peter shouldn’t be alone. Unless . . . you want to have one of your own?”

“Why?” Peggy said, “when this one is already here.”

“We could look at her,” he said. “We can always say no.”

“Maybe this is happening too fast,” she said.

“If we don’t take her someone else will. If you really want her you shouldn’t take the chance of losing her.”

“You sound as if you’re talking about a house,” Peggy said, and to her surprise she gave a little laugh, the first one she’d heard coming out of her mouth in so long she almost couldn’t remember.

They slept on it, albeit sleeplessly, and the next day at breakfast she and Ed decided she would call to make an appointment. It wouldn’t do any harm just to look. . . .

Neither Peggy nor Ed had been in Brooklyn before, and driving there they got lost, but mainly because they were both so nervous. The bony and odd-voiced Mrs. Key in her old-fashioned hair net looked like someone out of a movie, but the adoption agency seemed a pleasant, reputable place. The two of them sat in armchairs in her office while a young woman brought the baby in. The infant girl looked just like her picture, except that she seemed restless and cranky, as if they had woken her up.

Peggy felt a tightness in her chest. She reached out and took the baby—who relaxed into her arms, as if she belonged there. Her hand closed over Peggy’s finger and she gurgled. Peggy looked into her blue eyes and remembered the shape of those eyes very well. She brushed her lips across the soft thatch of white-blond hair and sniffed. “She smells like Marianne,” Peggy said.

“All babies smell alike,” Ed said.

“No. Take her. Touch her. Look.”

He picked up the baby gingerly, as if he were afraid. But Peggy could see from the way he gazed at her that he was as moved as she was.

She was Marianne and not Marianne, the past and the future. This baby was meant to be in my life, Peggy knew, and she wondered why she had never before thought of having one.

“I can hurry the paperwork so you can have her for Christmas,” Mrs. Key said.

“Could we discuss this outside?” Ed asked.

“I’ll go out and leave you alone,” Mrs. Key said. “Call when you want me.” She and the young woman and the baby were gone in an instant, and Peggy felt loss.

“What kind of careless people would leave such a young baby and go out in a car?” she said. “Their only baby? Who would do that?”

“Maybe they had to be somewhere, for a short time,” Ed said. “They left her with the neighbor they trusted. They didn’t know they would be killed.”

“She’s all alone. I want her,” Peggy said.

“Then so do I.”

“It’s a miracle. Isn’t it? A miracle.”

“I suppose so,” Ed said. “It’s strange, all right. What are the chances of this happening, just out of the blue; this coincidence, this gift?”

“Don’t question a miracle,” Peggy said. “I want to name her Marguerite.”

He looked distressed for a moment. “Isn’t that a little too much like Marianne?” he asked gently.

“No. We can call her Markie for short.”

“All right.”

“So it’s settled?” she said. “We’ll take her?”

“Yes. I know this is the right thing to do.”

“Of course it is.” She strode to the door and opened it. “Mrs. Key?” The woman was there so quickly you might have thought she had been outside in the hall listening, but even if she was, what difference did it make? “We want this baby,” Peggy said.

The baby was theirs in time for Christmas, as promised. Before she arrived it seemed every moment of Peggy’s life was taken up with related activity. Marianne’s room had to be redecorated in order not to be obsessive, but then the new room looked very much like the old one had years ago. All Marianne’s toddler things were removed to the attic and placed in a trunk. Peggy and Ed had discussed how they would treat the new baby, and they both agreed immediately that Markie would not have to live in Marianne’s shadow. She had a right to grow up to be her own person, and if being brought up by the same parents, in the same home, with the same older brother, and the same caretaker, made her somewhat like Marianne, so be it.

Marianne at three years old, Peggy was beginning to realize, had shown characteristics that would have changed with time and socialization. Other aspects of her personality had been destined from birth. Peggy didn’t know how Marianne would have turned out, and she had no more idea how Marguerite would. Look at her own two sisters! She and Ginger and Joan were each so different, and always had been. This was the first time Peggy had been able to think about Joan in a normal way, and she wondered if having a new baby might someday mellow her.

The whole family—except Joan, of course—came to the Glover household in Larchmont to celebrate Christmas and the arrival of Markie. If it was nearly impossible to handle a Christmas dinner and a tiny baby, Peggy didn’t notice it. Everyone pitched in to help. Rose was in ecstasy over her new grandchild. Celia looked smug, as if the entire idea had been hers all along, and only Peggy’s stubbornness had made her take so long. Ben remarked that Markie looked just like Peggy had when she was that age. Ed took movies of each one of them holding the baby. Hugh brought piles of boxes of beautifully wrapped baby clothes, and Teddy brought a red rocking horse. Ginger brought cloth baby books. Aunt Harriette, her beaming husband by her side, brought an expensive white crocheted afghan for the carriage.

Aunt Maude was there with her Bristol family, except for the children who were living out of town with their own adult lives, and so was Aunt Daisy. If it hadn’t been for the arrival of Markie after such tragedy and loss, Peggy’s two older aunts would have spent this Christmas out of town too, and Harriette would have been on a cruise, but the occasion was special. Everyone had heard the story and everyone needed to look, as much as to wish the new parents well.

“How do you like our baby?” Peter asked them all, as if Markie was his. His parents weren’t crazy anymore, he could see that, and he was relieved.

With so much excitement and happiness in the house, it was even more obvious that Joan was missing. Joan had called her parents that morning, Rose whispered to Maude, although Peggy overheard. Joan was still in California and wanted to know if everyone was well. Of course Rose had told her the good news about the baby. Joan had seemed pleased.

Joan’s absence, Peggy thought, is better than that ghostly presence I was used to. Her absence seems merely neutral today. Joan isn’t here. That’s an improvement, because usually she is too much here. Today I feel calm. Poor Joan, I wonder if she has people who care about her to spend Christmas with.

When the dinner was over, and all the presents unwrapped, the people who were staying in New York hotels headed there, the rest of them off to Rose’s to beat the traffic, Peggy, Ed, Peter, and Markie were alone. It was the peaceful family she remembered: four people, the four corners of her universe.

“To bed,” she told her son, and he was so tired he obeyed.

Markie was asleep in her own room, a night light next to the crib. The door was open to keep her safe. Peggy and Ed slid under the sheets in their own bed, and put their arms around each other—naturally, affectionately, without hesitation, a happily married couple after a long day. Peggy felt as if cool rain was sliding down her dehydrated body when he touched her. They both smiled.

“Let’s shut the door for just a minute,” she murmured. She knew if the baby cried they would hear her.

Ed shut their bedroom door, and they moved into one another’s arms again. It was not as if she could pretend nothing terrible had happened to them after all, but that she knew now they had another chance.

When Ed began to make love to her Peggy wondered what would happen this time, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew her body wouldn’t betray her. Her body knew she was safe too, like Marguerite, like all of them, normal people, simply living their lives. It was the only thing she had always wanted.