An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  “Carah’s still coming, though.”

  “Yes. Carah’s still coming.” Diane laughed, harshly. “You know, once, when the girls were little, an idiot woman actually said to me that it must be a comfort to have twins, knowing that if you lost one –

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Nora. I’m not saying I think that’s what you meant.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just – I feel so bad for Carah. She said to me, ‘Mom, I can’t choose anymore.’ Why should she have to choose? Why can’t she choose everyone? I hate that I’ve made life so much more difficult for her than it ought to be. And for Rose.

  “I swear to God, I run this through my mind every single day of my life. I never forget it. What if I hadn’t let myself get drawn in to that . . . thing with Audrey? If I’d stayed with Bob six months more, until Rose and Carah were out of high school. Or college. Then made a different life. What if I’d left him when they were really small? I knew the marriage was a terrible mistake almost immediately, long before I fully understood why. If I’d left then and taken the girls with me, maybe when I did understand, it wouldn’t have created such an explosion in their lives. It might even have happened naturally –”

  She wiped away tears with the heels of her hands. “Even if the thing with Audrey had happened earlier, when they were small, it might not have been so bad. I know. There’d have been a custody fight with Bob. But, even if he won, I’d have gotten visitation rights. The girls would have had to spend time with me. I could have –”

  “What?” Nora asked.

  “I don’t know,” Diane said. “Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference at all. I just think that going off to college, throwing themselves into whole new lives, made it easier for them not to deal with what happened. Easier not to miss me. I mean, in a best-case scenario, who wants to hang out with their parents while they’re in college? I certainly didn’t. I liked my parents just fine and I couldn’t wait to get away from them.”

  Nora smiled. “Claire hasn’t exactly been homesick herself,” she said. “We’re down from e-mails every day – sometimes twice a day – to maybe three or four a week. The occasional phone call.”

  “Exactly,” Diane said. “And that’s a good thing. It’s what you want for your kids. Unless it lets them avoid dealing with something between you that really needs to be resolved. Once they go away, you might never resolve it. The thing is, what you don’t realize until it’s too late is that once your kids have left home – really, emotionally left home – it’s pretty much up to them to decide what your relationship will be.

  Jo had understood that, Nora thought, driving home. Once, when Claire was just a little girl, Nora overheard Jo tell one of the waitresses who worked for her, “Honey, you had that child because it’s what you decided to do. What you wanted. If you didn’t want a child and got pregnant anyway, it was your mistake. Either way, it’s your job to do the best you can for him and let him go. He’s a good boy, he knows what’s right. You can keep on trying to control him with some idea of what he owes you, but I guarantee it’s the quickest road to heartache I know.”

  At the time, this had struck Nora as absolutely true, and she swore to herself that she would always remember it. Yet, in desperation, she had ignored what she knew when Claire set her heart on going to IU. “We’ve done everything for you,” Nora said, “given you everything.” And when Claire simply turned and walked away from her, she suffered the heartache Jo had warned against. She’d apologized, but neither the words nor the hurt they’d caused could ever be fully erased. Whatever adult relationship she and her daughter would make over time would in some way be built upon them – and on other hurts and disappointments that would surely come as Claire grew further away from them, into her real life.

  It occurred to her that Jo’s genius as a mother was to make you believe, as she did herself, that her own life was good and full enough for her, and anything you gave her, any part you wanted to play in it – large or small – well, that was enough, too. Her attachments were fierce, but all blessing. No matter what you did or how far away you went, she’d hold you in her heart. She’d never give up on you. Never, ever let you go.

  Her own mother’s love had been a burden to her when she was young, her family an obstacle to overcome. After Bobby’s death, she could not bear to be in the presence of her father, lost by then in an alcoholic haze. She felt shut out of the bright, long-suffering triumvirate that her sisters and mother made. In time, if things had turned out differently, would she have made her way back to them?

  She had thought of her mother often when Claire was small. Countless times, she caught herself saying things to Claire that her mother had said to her, little things: “Hold your horses,” she said when Claire was impatient; “Home again, Finnegan,” when they pulled into the driveway; “Good night, God bless,” each night, when she tucked her into bed. Helpless when Claire suffered some failure or a slight from a friend, she better understood her mother’s mute yearning.

  Raising Claire had been so easy, she saw now, because all those years they had been able to keep the world at bay. Charlie’s veterinary practice had afforded a comfortable income and the two of them, living only in the moment, had no emotional entanglements outside their little family to distract them, no personal ambitions that might have interfered with what Claire needed. The house Charlie had grown up in, the small town, the forest, the lake – another child might have chafed against such an insular universe, but Claire thrived and grew strong in it. Except for Jo’s illness and decline, Claire had never known real sadness. So far, there’d been no problem in her life that could not be solved.

  Lately, Nora had begun to imagine what it might be like to tell her daughter the truth about her life. She might gather up the courage, she thought, if she could tell Claire the story and know it could be left at that. But what if Claire insisted on meeting her grandparents? Were they even alive? And what about Amy and Susan? Had they forgiven her for all the hurt she’d caused? Would they even want to see her?

  And there was Tom. There was no way she could make Claire understand what had made her run away from her life without explaining how she had felt about him. No matter what she told her daughter about that relationship, or how much, something would be changed between them forever, and she couldn’t know what that would mean.

  Worse, if she told Claire she’d have to tell Charlie. Every time she considered this, she remembered how she’d decided, suddenly, to spend the night before their wedding in the little apartment above Jo’s café. It was tradition, she said. The groom shouldn’t see the bride until the moment she appeared before him the day of the ceremony. But she could tell neither Charlie nor Jo quite believed her. The wedding they’d planned was hardly a traditional one: a brief civil service at the courthouse in Traverse City, just the three of them. Jo would be one witness and they’d been assured that someone in the office would be glad to serve as the second.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Nora said. “Really.”

  She had no intention of walking away. She’d run everything through her mind a thousand times, balancing her life with Charlie and Jo against any last chance of going backwards to Tom. She had not been able to forget him. Years had passed and, still, sometimes he would come to her in a dream, or while she was in the midst of some everyday chore. What she said when he appeared in a dream, what she wanted to say in those waking moments, was, “I’m so sorry.” Just that. Some door inside her would close if she could just say that to him. Maybe, maybe she could begin to forgive herself for what she’d done.

  But to find him, to see him face-to-face, would be to realize fully everything she’d lost – and she’d have to be Jane again to do it, something she simply could not afford. So she went to the little room where what would turn out to be the rest of her life had begun, lit a candle, and in its flickering light rewound her life to the moment she’d met Tom, relived it – joyfully, tearfully – and let it go. In the morning, new
snow falling, blanketing the town, the life she’d chosen felt possible again, right. She could not change what happened the night she followed Bridget. What it had done to Tom, to her family, to herself – Jane – she could never, ever repair. To marry Charlie, though, to be the Nora in whose presence he’d come alive again, might begin to atone for it.

  She dressed in the pretty, blue wool dress Jo had insisted on buying her for the occasion, drove the winding road to Traverse City her heart as light as the snowflakes skittering across the windshield. It was so beautiful: snow filling up the fields, icing the bare tree limbs. The feeling held. Standing beside Charlie in the courthouse, Jo beside them. Later, in the honeymoon suite at the hotel, sated after making love, she could see the snow still falling. Blowing and drifting now, the wind whistling in from the lake, the sound of the snow plows beneath, in the street. Just the two of them cocooned there. Safe. She would keep it that way, she thought. She did love Charlie. That’s what she could do for him.

  She couldn’t break the promise she’d made to herself all those years, even if it meant keeping the truth from her daughter. But since Laura Ann Pearson’s arrest, keeping or not keeping the secret no longer seemed entirely up to her. Reporters were already dredging up other stories about sixties radicals who’d gone underground and were never heard of again. In a year, it would be the thirtieth anniversary of the Christmas bombing, and it was perfectly within the realm of possibility that a Bloomington reporter would revisit it – perhaps even an Indiana Daily Student reporter. Would Claire, coming upon such a story, be struck by the photograph of the girl who’d disappeared that night – a girl who looked uncannily like herself?

  19

  “The Long and Winding Road”

  Charlie’s mood lightened with October: a series of cool, golden days and Parents Weekend nearing. He started collecting things to take to Claire: fudge from the candy shop in town, a big, fleecy hooded sweatshirt with “Sleeping Bear Dunes” on the front, a bag of the first Michigan apples. The day before they left, he stopped at the Hummingbird Café to pick up a dozen triple-chunk chocolate chip cookies – Jo’s recipe.

  “Remember?” he said to Nora. “How, when she was little, she’d sit in a window booth and eat the whole plate of them Mother brought, just watching the world go by.”

  She did – and hoped Claire would remember, too. Hoped Claire would see how much her father needed her to remember. The eagerness with which he looked forward to the visit pierced her heart and heightened the sense of foreboding that had been building since the day in August when she’d sat in People’s Park and her own memories, held tight within her until then, had begun to unravel. This afternoon she’d Googled Tom. She had no intention of contacting him, she told herself. She just wanted to know if he was still there. She clicked and “Thomas M. Gilbert, Civil Trial Law Attorney – Bloomington, Indiana” popped up, as she had been almost certain it would. She did not click a second time to reveal his address or any personal information. She didn’t want him to be that real to her.

  Still, she could not help thinking about him as they drove south on Friday morning. There’d be no time to look him up, even if she was foolish enough to consider it. But he’d be there, somewhere, and she worried about how this might affect her time with Claire. She worried about the busker who’d called out her name on Kirkwood Avenue last summer, too. She’d avoid that area if she could, keep her eye out for him, and hope that if he saw her with Charlie and Claire he’d have the decency to leave her be.

  Thankfully, Charlie was oblivious. In fact, chatting companionably beside her, he seemed more himself to Nora than he had since they had begun to consider Claire’s college choice. She loved the funny way he talked about the animals in his care, as if he were in cahoots with them against their often overbearing and unreasonable owners. Diane had talked him into adding a line of pet boutique items, and he spoke almost apologetically about the tartan plaid, belted sweater McDuff, the terrier, would have to forebear this winter and the Harley Davidson collar that Kirk Wheatley had bought for King, his majestic Great Dane. He’d been amused to learn that the Dalmatian, Sheba Louise, had dragged her ratty old pillow from the trash and set it on the new designer bed her owner, Mrs. Otto, had bought for her. Nora listened, dozing and waking to the collection of music Charlie had brought – Vivaldi, Mendelssohn’s “Italian Symphony,” a reflection of the happy anticipation he must be feeling.

  Claire was waiting in the lobby of the dorm when they arrived in the late afternoon and threw her arms around Charlie, talking a mile a minute. “I’m so glad you guys are here,” she said. “I couldn’t stand waiting in my room, so I came downstairs. Look!” She pointed to a pile of books and papers abandoned on a nearby chair. “I thought I’d study. Ha! All I did was get up and go over and look out the window every three minutes.”

  Charlie stood, a little abashed, still holding the shopping bag with all her presents in it as Claire turned and embraced Nora, still talking. Her roommate, Emily, was waiting upstairs. Her dad was coming, after all – this evening. So could the two of them come along to dinner, instead of just Emily? And Dylan, of course. He’d be going to the game with them tomorrow, as well. His parents weren’t coming. She laughed. “They’re totally over him, he says. They don’t even miss him anymore. Like you guys will be over me next year.

  “Just kidding,” she said, when she saw Charlie’s face. “I mean, really, I’m so fabulous! How could anyone get over me?”

  Heading for the elevator, she chattered on. She’d gotten an “A” on her most recent paper in composition; she loved her literature class, where they were reading King Lear. “Oh, God,” she groaned, to find a crowd of people waiting near the elevator door.

  Crunched among a half-dozen girls with their boyfriends as the packed elevator made its way upwards, Nora couldn’t help remembering the strict rules there’d been when she was a freshman in college. Boys in the room had been strictly forbidden, punishable by expulsion.

  “Man in the hall!” the custodians hollered when the elevator door opened, before making their way down the corridor – which Bridget had thought was hilarious. Other girls would scurry to their rooms and close the doors; Bridget loved to wait till the guy who’d hollered figured it was safe, then saunter out of their room, half-dressed, just to see what he would do about it.

  She had worried a little about how Claire would adapt. Having had her own spacious room at home, Nora feared she would feel a lack of privacy, living communally for the first time. But within moments it was clear that Claire was as happy living with Emily as she herself had been living with Bridget. They mugged in the clutter of photos on the bulletin board; their conversation was rich with jokes and references to experiences they’d shared in the two months they’d lived together.

  At dinner, Emily’s father, a genial businessman, drew Charlie out, questioning him about his veterinary practice and about vacation properties in the area. He’d flown directly from doing a business deal in Dallas, he said. He’d expected to be there another week and had been thrilled to finish early so that he could make it for Parents Weekend after all. When he said he planned to walk over to the stadium with them the next day, hoping to scalp a ticket for the game, Nora said, impulsively, “Please. Take mine. Really. You guys go.”

  “Mom, thanks,” Claire said, beaming.

  “I don’t mind,” she said, her heart racing at the implications of what she had just done. “It’ll be nice for you girls to go with your dads.”

  Later, in the hotel room, she shrugged Charlie away when he gave her a hug and whispered how nice it was what she’d done. “It wasn’t that nice, given how much I don’t like football,” she said, more curtly than she had intended.

  Saturday morning dawned sunny and crisp and, walking out into it to meet Claire for breakfast, Nora remembered how she had loved football Saturdays just like this one when she was young – how they started out cool enough for a sweater but by mid-afternoon left them all sweltering on the
bleachers in the stadium, prime for the moment when Pete would say, “Chianti snow cones,” and dispatch a pledge to the concession stand to bring back a cardboard tray of perfect round scoops of crushed ice in paper cones. The wineskins would come out from their hiding places inside the boys’ London Fog jackets then, and the sweet, syrupy wine poured over the ice made snow cones that gave them a happy little buzz and made them forget all about the hot sun and the scratch of wool. On the field, the inept Hoosiers fumbled again and again. The cheerleaders cheered nonetheless. The alumni, a massive block of red across the field, cheered with them. But in the student stands, the game was the middle of a party that had begun with lunch at the fraternity house and would continue with a dance that would last till just before all the girls had to be back in their dorms or sorority houses at one AM. Even then it wasn’t really over. Back in their room, Jane and Bridget put on the Supremes, curled up on their beds and replayed the day.

  How could it still seem so real, Nora wondered now? She was glad she didn’t have to go to the game today, glad she didn’t have to sit in the stadium all afternoon, remembering, and sent Charlie and Claire off just after noon with the reassurance that she’d be fine alone. She’d take a long walk, she said – which she did. But shuffling through the dry leaves, following the lovely, winding paths through the old, wooded area of campus, she was, from one moment to the next, the person she had been here long ago – Jane, so light, so fraught with possibility that she feared she might simply fly up into the sky. And the person she was now, Nora, too often heavy-hearted, too often overcome with sorrow. In time, she found herself approaching the university gates at the edge of the campus, just a block from People’s Park.

  She saw the busker on the low wall next to the old Von Lee Theater, but kept going anyway, past him, down Kirkwood Avenue and into the park. She sat on the bench where she had watched the boys play Hacky Sack last summer and watched the world go on around her: music and laughter, traffic passing by, dry leaves pin-wheeling through dusty sunlight, gathering in red and yellow drifts at the edges of the park. Hippie-types, straggly-haired and dressed in baggy clothes, lounged around the nearby sculpture, smoking, talking with their friends; couples sat at the umbrella tables, chatting over coffee from the nearby Starbucks; students, like Claire, showed their parents around and moved on down the street.