Wildwood (29 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
“What a prick.”
“He started to have trouble in school and that’s when he came back. Columbia was hard for him. Not that he wasn’t smart enough, but there were so many distractions. Teddy loved New York.”
She’d seen him with the dancer once. Jeanne was walking back from the early service at St. John the Divine and saw them ahead of her, still dressed in Saturday night clothes. Teddy was doing a little dance step and the girl had hold of him by the waist. Looking back now, Jeanne knew it might have been better for both of them if he had stayed away; but in those days the idea would have burned a hole in her brain.
“He came back to me so I’d help him get through school. I ended up doing his work and mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell him to take a hike?”
Jeanne reached down and picked up one of the cigarette halves she’d tossed away.
“Look. If you decide to sail a boat across the Pacific, you have to sail it in bad weather and good. You don’t get to stop in the middle of the ocean and say, Gee, I don’t think I’ll do this anymore.” She paused to admire the metaphor and hiccupped. “We have a contract.”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “And he broke it.”
“That didn’t give me permission to do the same.”
And I loved him.
“All my life, I’d never imagined anyone would ever want me and then there was Teddy. He was smart and you remember how gorgeous he was and he had so much flair . . .”
And I loved him.
“All my life, I’d never imagined anyone would ever want me and then there was Teddy. He was smart and you remember how gorgeous he was and he had so much flair . . .”
“You can love anyone you like, Jeanne. You don’t have to explain.”
Jeanne split the thin cigarette paper with her nail and laid the half cigarette open like a patient at surgery. “Things were okay until around Christmas. I got sick and the doctor said I had to take it easy for the baby’s sake. Teddy said it was too stressful for me to be in grad school and pregnant at the same time and that’s why I got sick in the first place. He said the best thing was for me to drop out and then I could help him get his degree. I could go back afterwards.”
This part of the story did shame her. Teddy this and Teddy that and Teddy everything: couldn’t she think for herself in those days? The daring and resourceful always-to-be-trusted-and-relied-upon Jeanne. If she wasn’t running after her father’s approval, she was going for Teddy’s.
“But, Jeanne, you have a degree. I’ve seen it on the wall in your office.”
Jeanne removed bits of tobacco from the paper and blew them off her fingertips a few at a time.
“Fake.” She held her breath and waited for the world to end. “We bought it in New York from a man who forged passports and green cards. It cost a bundle, let me tell you. I always planned to go back to school eventually. Meantime, Teddy said it didn’t hurt anyone if I just put it up on the wall. He said it wasn’t any worse than beefing up a résumé.”
“But he got his.”
“Fair and square.” She smiled. “More or less.”
“How could you let him talk you into something like that?”
“Why’d you fuck that Brazilian soccer player?”
“Who?”
“You told me you never had one word of conversation. He couldn’t speak English and you—”
Liz groaned. “At the time . . .”
“Exactly.”
“That guy was one night, Jeanne. What we’re talking about now is a whole life. Your life.”
“I wanted him to love me. Haven’t you ever wanted anyone to love you? I wanted his praise. I was afraid of him.” Afraid of the final consequence, the consequence never spoken of but implicit in every conversation with her father.
Do what I want or I will abandon you.
Do what I want or I will abandon you.
Like we abandoned Billy Phillips, Jeanne thought. Like we walked away and left him in the dirt because he frightened Hannah, because he was dim and strange and did not please.
Liz leaned forward and asked softly, “What happened to the baby, Jeanne?”
Jeanne tried sighing to relieve the pressure under her rib cage, but it stayed in place like a stalled weather front.
“He had a squashy little nose and his hair was almost black—like my brother’s. Beautiful.”
“Omigod, why didn’t you tell anyone? Did your folks know?”
Jeanne laughed shortly. “You must be kidding me. They would have counted backward. You know the way it was then.”
Liz lifted her hands and let them drop, stared at them, shaking her head.
“He was a colicky little thing. Not really healthy in that drafty old apartment. And he cried so much he interrupted Teddy’s sleep—”
“You brought him home from the hospital?” Liz’s face registered horror and pain at the same time.
Jeanne’s tongue seemed to have swollen to the size of a bath sponge. She drank the last of her beer. “We only had one bedroom and Teddy wouldn’t let me put the cradle in with us because he said it was bad for babies to sleep with their parents. So I made him a little nook in the living room, behind the bookcases. I made him a mobile with smiling faces dangling from it and hung it right over him so when he woke up he wouldn’t feel lonely.
From the instant I saw his squashy little nose and puffy eyes, I loved him more than I loved myself.
But not more than she loved Teddy.
“He couldn’t study at night. He said the baby and I were driving him out of the house, making him fail.
“Even when James was quiet he made little noises to himself, and Teddy said those irritated him more than yelling. Down the hall the Jamaican students partied five nights a week and that never troubled Teddy, but the little snuffling whimpers of a baby . . .
“In the end he wore me down with arguing. It took almost three months.”
“Three months.” Jeanne heard the break in Liz’s voice. “He recognized you. He must have been smiling.”
“Teddy said it was gas.”
“Christ, what a bastard.”
“I was worse. I just couldn’t stand up to him.”
“Like me and Bluegang.”
“Aw, shit, I suppose.”
When he told her not to pick the baby up because she’d spoil him, she did as she was told. When he said that nursing would ruin her figure and he hated saggy tits, she put James on formula. When he said James was a cross baby, a tense baby, a sickly baby because she was an uptight mother, she believed him. She was being selfish, he explained. She was cheating Teddy out of a good degree, cheating James out of a happy family, cheating some infertile couple that longed for a baby. James was driving him crazy and he couldn’t stand it much longer and she’d have to choose . . .
“So I chose.”
Between Teddy and James, between returning to her father with a baby, no degree and no husband. Or. A husband and His-and-Hers degrees. Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Tate: the perfect couple.
“He went to a good home, Liz. I made sure of that. In Rye. Probably better than any we could have made for him.”
“Have you tried to contact him?”
She spoke about her trip to Berkeley.
“He’s a grown man. You should know him.”
“He’d never understand.”
“Give him a chance.”
She knew she wouldn’t. A small part of Jeanne hoped James/Mark did not know he had once had different parents from those who raised him. Life would be easier for him if the truth were hidden. If he knew the truth it wouldn’t matter how good his adoptive parents were, nothing compensated for abandonment. She’d seen this demonstrated countless times among her boys at Hilltop. And she never wanted to explain how she had rejected him for a man she didn’t even like anymore. He had appeared happy and healthy when she watched him in Berkeley. Better he stay that way than know the truth.
“Have you told Hannah this?”
Jeanne shook her head.
They sat, heads back, staring into the empty sky.
Liz said, “I’ve never really known you, Jeanne. Not since we were kids anyway. I thought that you didn’t know me, but it goes both ways. This is such a huge thing to keep secret.”
“We each have a Rosebud, don’t we?” A sled. A rejected baby. A dead boy. “I’m not proud of what I did, Liz.”
“But you were so young.”
“That’s no excuse. I knew what I did was wrong.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Without being asked, Liz went into the house and came back with two more beers. They drank in silence.
“No wonder you want me to have the baby.”
“I don’t want you to give up your chance, your last chance.”
Liz walked to the edge of the patio where scarlet and gold bougainvillea, thriving in the drought, grew in neon profusion. She brushed a branch with the palm of her hand and the bracts disengaged and floated down like bright hot flakes.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but now I’ve heard your story, I’ve changed my mind. I think you have a right to know. If you don’t already.” Liz sat again. “Saturday night, when I went in to use the phone after dinner, Teddy came in and made a pass at me.”
Jeanne raised an eyebrow. “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re not the first.”
“Why do you put up with it? And don’t tell me it’s a contract because—”
“I love him. Or something like that.”
“Oh, Jeannie.”
“I wish I didn’t. Life would be easier if I didn’t. But he needs me and in that way I guess he’s kind of like James. My baby.”
“But he’s not a baby. He’s a man. And not a very nice one.”
“If I give up Teddy it means I gave James away for nothing.”
They heard footsteps on the gravel and Turner, the P.E. instructor, came through the oleander hedge.
“Adam Weed’s had an accident,” he said. “He’s in the infirmary.”
Hannah left Resurrection House in midafternoon. In Rinconada she stopped at Mario’s for onion focaccia and coffee beans and she was on her way up Casabella Road when, on a whim, she turned into the old town cemetery and parked her car near the caretaker’s shed.
“G’day to you, Mrs. Tarwater.” Brian, the caretaker, an Irish transplant who had never lost his brogue, spoke to her from his potting shed. “I was over by your parents this very mornin’ and they’re looking fine. But I’m sorry to say that veronica you put in last spring, it’s gone and died. I dug it up and put in a plug or two of new grass. We should be sayin’ novenas for rain, if you ask me.” To Brian the cemetery was more a garden than a graveyard.
Hannah thanked him for his work and strolled up the hill to where her parents were buried. She sat on the granite square marking her father’s grave and propped her feet against the edge of her mother’s stone.
At Resurrection House Betts had called her in for another talk. She wanted Hannah to understand that having Angel’s mother as a live-in resident was the best thing for both mother and child. She outlined the pros and cons as if all that mattered was logic, as if a baby girl were a number in an equation. Hannah hadn’t bothered to argue. If she said, “I’m the only hope Angel has,” Betts was sure to deliver one of her gentle lectures on maintaining distance. Under most circumstances Hannah would agree with her. But Angel was a special case, and nothing Betts could say would change that.
Hannah felt the cold of the granite stone through her jeans and the wind was up and the air full of leaves. She pulled her jacket across her chest and shifted her position on the stone. Pins and needles chased each other down her leg. Overhead the sky was hard and bright and hurt her eyes. As she walked back to the car Hannah caught sight of Father Joe leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. Not far from him an old woman knelt by a stone. As Hannah approached him Father Joe put a finger to his lips.
“You asked me yesterday about Mrs. Phillips.” He tipped his head toward the old woman. “I bring her up here from time to time so she can tend her boy’s grave.”
Hannah stared at the bent figure in a brown coat, brown shoes and heavy stockings. She was the size of a child with a narrow back and bent shoulders. As she weeded the gravesite, the wrists poking out from the cuffs of her coat looked thin as pencils. She wore a hat with faded yellow lilies drooping around the brim.
“Pretty spry for more than ninety, huh?”
“You shouldn’t smoke.”
“I’ll introduce you. She might remember you.”
“Another time, Joe.”
He stopped her exit with a hand on her arm. “How’re you doing today? How’s the panther?”
“What?”
“You said there was a panther in you, trying to get out.” Father Joe had small intense eyes that fixed Hannah directly, daring her not to hold the contact. “I liked your metaphor so much, Hannah. If I still gave sermons, I’d use it. I can’t believe you’ve forgotten it.”
Hannah laughed and Mrs. Phillips turned around, poked her head forward and pushed her eyeglasses up on her nose. One hand fluttered a greeting.
Hannah looked away, her eye sockets throbbing.
“Don’t forget what I said about confession. If you’d prefer, I can arrange it with a priest you don’t know. There’s a woman over at St. Paul’s—”
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