Crossroads

by Belva Plain

  Carol Anne began to cry, Cassandra and Gwen’s nanny came rushing in, and by the time the adults had sorted out the different versions of the incident offered by the witnessing children, Gwen was already regretting what she’d done. She probably would have said she was sorry on her own, if Cassandra hadn’t pursed her lips in the way that required instant obedience and said, “Gwen, I’m ashamed of you. Apologize to Carol Anne immediately.”

  All of Gwen’s grievances came back to her, and iron entered her soul. She raised her head to look her mother in the eye and shook her head.

  Cassandra was stunned. She couldn’t believe she was being defied. “I told you to apologize, Gwendolyn,” she repeated.

  This time Gwen whispered, “No.”

  She’d been ordered to go to her room while the other children were served cake and ice cream and sent quickly on their way home. After they were gone, Cassandra had come upstairs to see her. With stubborn pride Gwen had refused to cry and she had refused to explain herself. But like the superwoman she was, Cassandra had seen into Gwen’s mind and understood what had motivated her.

  “Jealousy is a particularly ugly emotion,” she’d said, “especially for someone in your position who has so much. Giving in to it is nothing more than self-indulgence, and refusing to acknowledge what you’ve done is beneath you.”

  But Gwen still couldn’t choke out the words “I’m sorry.”

  There was no way to tell her mother why. Perhaps at that age she didn’t even know all the reasons herself. Years later she would understand that it hadn’t just been the one party where she’d felt like she was “not enough”; she’d been feeling that all of her life. And the person who had made her feel that way—the person who was not going to get the satisfaction of an apology from her—was Cassandra.

  * * *

  Gwen had finished dressing. She was wearing her favorite outfit for early autumn; a flared corduroy skirt, and a light sweater with a flannel shirt tossed over it, in case there was a nip in the air. She could tie the shirt around her waist if the weather warmed. As a concession to the rain of the previous evening and the wet grass, she had pulled on an old pair of boots. She sat at the vanity table she seldom used, and briefly contemplated, then rejected, the idea of putting on some lipstick. She looked at herself in the mirror.

  Obviously, she was as capable of jealousy today as she had been when she was five. And she didn’t want to be. She agreed with Cassandra: It was a particularly ugly emotion when you had been given as much as she had. And she’d gotten better over the years. It had taken a truly beautiful girl like Jewel to bring on an attack of the devil voices that whispered that she was inadequate. Well, at least this time she hadn’t reached out and yanked a handful of the shining blue-black hair that fell in waves around Jewel’s face. But she had been unforgivably rude. She sighed. The sad part was, even though she couldn’t control the devil voices, she knew why she was so vulnerable to them.

  Chapter Five

  Gwen had read once that the first five years of one’s life were the formative ones and she knew this to be true. In that time, scars could be made on the soul that never faded. Or one could develop a belief in oneself that would last a lifetime. Gwen had collected . . . well, scars might be too strong a word; a better one might be insecurities. She wished she could say it had been no one’s fault, but that wasn’t true.

  It had started when she was an infant. She couldn’t remember that time, of course, but she knew that was when she’d gotten the message that she was “not enough.” That her mother, the most important figure in her life, had found her lacking in some way. How she had gotten that feeling Gwen couldn’t have said, although she had pondered the question at great length.

  Was it the fact that her mother did not do the daily chores of caring for her as other mothers did? But Cassandra Wright was not like other women; it was impossible to imagine her changing a diaper, or patiently feeding spoonful after spoonful of sloppy baby food into a tiny resisting mouth. Servants did such things for her and had since she herself was a child. Besides, Cassandra worked long hours at the glassworks, where her responsibilities were overwhelming. No one could have expected her to involve herself with the minutiae of child-rearing. From the beginning Gwen had understood that. Gwen had always been an understanding child.

  She understood that her mother was not one for overt gestures of affection; she did not expect Cassandra to throw her arms around her in a bear hug, to shower her with kisses, or to coo endlessly over her. Reserve had been bred into Cassandra’s bones, and somehow Gwen had known that. So why did she feel that in some profound way she was a disappointment? Why did she feel that there was a barrier—thin as a silken veil but strong as steel—that sometimes descended when her mother was with her? It wasn’t there all the time, but when it came she could feel her mother withdraw in a subtle way. Then Cassandra would hand Gwen over to Sarah—the nanny who had replaced Gwen’s nursemaid, Mavis. Sarah would whisk Gwen away, and Gwen would know that once again she’d been banished.

  Not that her mother was ever cruel to her. Cassandra rarely lost her temper; she was kind, and fair, and always generous. Still, children know when they are a source of joy. And Gwen knew there were times when she was not. And she wondered what was wrong with her.

  * * *

  She’d always known she was adopted. Cassandra had told her when she was very young. “You probably weren’t old enough to understand what it meant,” Cassandra said later—Gwen was seven at the time, and they were talking about it. “It probably would have been better if I had waited until you were more mature. But too many people around here knew about it, and you know the way they all like to gossip about us . . . the Wright family . . . and I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone but me.” She paused. “Of course, I knew how intelligent you were. I was sure if you had any questions you would have asked me.”

  But I do have questions, Gwen thought. Lots of them. I just never felt like I could ask them.

  And then, because hope springs eternal, she asked her biggest one, “Why did you pick me?”

  And still clinging to hope, she waited for her mother to say, Because I fell in love with you the second I saw you. Or, perhaps, Because I couldn’t imagine my life without you.

  “I had wanted children throughout my first marriage,” Cassandra said.

  Was it Gwen’s imagination or was she speaking a little too carefully?

  “And after he . . . my husband . . . died, and I saw you . . . it seemed like a golden opportunity . . . and . . .”

  Gwen knew it wasn’t her imagination; her mother, who always knew what she wanted to say, who was always so sure of herself, was stumbling. And hope died. “But it wasn’t a golden opportunity,” Gwen said slowly. “You made a mistake.”

  Her mother gave a little gasp. “No, Gwen!”

  “You thought you wanted a child but you really didn’t. It’s okay, Mother. Everyone makes mistakes. . . .” She was trying to sound like a grown-up intelligent girl of seven, but her voice broke on the last word.

  “That wasn’t it. . . . It was . . . ” And for a second Gwen thought her mother was going to say what it was. But then Gwen spoiled everything by starting to cry.

  Cassandra dropped her reserve and got down on her knees to look Gwen in the eye. “Gwen, I’ve never ever regretted it!” she said. And then she added something that Gwen would ponder for years. “No matter how it started out, I am so glad I did it. Always remember that.”

  * * *

  Gwen checked her face again in the mirror. Then she caught herself and had to laugh. What are you hoping will happen? she mocked herself. You’re still you. You haven’t suddenly become a tropical flower. Still she looked herself over carefully, her simple outfit, her lack of makeup, her hair held off her face with a clip.You’re enough. Grow up and believe that you’re enough. But the mind saying something intelligent like that and the heart believing it were two entirely different things.

  * * *

&
nbsp; Gwen realized that not all of her difficulties could be attributed to her mother’s strange shifts in mood. There was a longstanding argument, she knew, about the influence of nature versus nurture on a child. And from the very beginning Gwen’s nature had been . . . unusual. Ordinary experiences could trigger ideas and fantasies in her that didn’t occur to other more . . .well, usual children. A case in point had been the Face in the Window Incident.

  When she was quite small, Gwen had seen her own reflection in a window. When she’d moved in a certain way the vision of her face had vanished altogether; when she moved again it reappeared, but it was distorted. This had brought up thoughts that were slightly disturbing, but also fascinating. She’d tried them out on Nanny Sarah.

  “How do I know I’m real,” she asked the woman. “How do I know I’m really here?”

  “What silly questions. You’re a real little girl, and you’re right here. Where else would you be? Now eat your lunch.”

  But Gwen couldn’t let the subject drop. “But what if we’re all just a part of a daydream some creature—one that’s much bigger and stronger than all of us, like God—is imagining. What if it decides to stop imagining us some day and we all just disappear!”

  This had brought on sputtering from the nanny about the Bible and good little girls not saying such things.

  Later, Gwen overheard the nanny telling the cook about it. “She’s an odd duck,” the nanny said. She didn’t sound as if she found it a particularly appealing trait.

  Unfortunately there were other indications of Gwen’s oddness. For a while she had become obsessed with words. “Why do we say it’s a plate?” she demanded. “Why don’t we call it spinach? Or a mud pie?”

  “Because it’s a plate, that’s its name,” her nanny had replied.

  “But what if the name is wrong? In other countries they call it something else.”

  “Well, we’re right here in the good old U.S. of A. So you don’t need to worry your head about what foreigners might say.”

  “But what if they’re right and we’re wrong? Or what if everyone is wrong? What if words don’t mean anything? What if nothing means anything?”

  “Odd duck,” said the nanny to the cook. “Just odd.”

  * * *

  Gwen gave up on Nanny Sarah. But questions kept cropping up in her mind. And no matter how hard she tried to keep them to herself, she needed to talk about them. So the next time she had one of her odd-duck ideas she decided to take it to the place where children were supposed to get answers—or so she had been told. She took it to her school.

  Gwen planned her presentation carefully; she didn’t want her teacher, Miss Spencer, thinking she was odd. This meant she had to wait until an empty Land O’Lakes butter box was thrown into the kitchen trash. She retrieved her treasure on a Saturday and hid it until Monday when she brought it to school. Monday morning was show-and-tell time, and when it was Gwen’s turn to speak she held the box out so the entire class could see it.

  “There’s a picture of a girl on this box,” she began. Something about the seriousness with which she said it—or maybe it was just the fact that she’d brought an old butter box to show-and-tell—must have seemed funny to the other children, because they started to titter. Normally this would have been enough to send Gwen back to her seat, but need drove her on. “The girl is holding a box of butter that has a picture on it of a girl holding a box of butter,” she went on bravely.

  “Yes, you’re absolutely right, Gwen. How interesting. Thank you for sharing that,” said Miss Spencer. “Now does anyone else have something to—”

  “But when does it stop?” Gwen broke in. “Does it just go on and on forever?”

  “Does what go on?” asked Miss Spencer who was as bewildered as Nanny Sarah had been.

  “The box!” Gwen said. The other kids were laughing out loud now. “The box and the girl, does it just go on forever with boxes and girls holding them? What does forever mean? And is there a bigger box that I can’t see with a bigger girl holding it . . .” and then to her horror Gwen felt the treacherous tears stinging at her eyes, and, dropping the Land O’Lakes box, she ran out of the classroom.

  “Neurotic,” Gwen overheard Miss Spencer say to the school nurse after she had taken Gwen to the nurse’s office to lie down for a little while. “The child is obviously having some serious problems.”

  “Are you going to ask for a conference with the parents?” asked the nurse.

  “Would you want to be the one to tell Cassandra Wright her daughter is disturbed? I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole.”

  And there it was. In addition to nurture and nature, there was another element forming the character of Gwen Wright when she was young. She was a Wright of Wright Glassworks, living in the vicinity of Wrightstown. If there was ever a definition of life in a fishbowl, that was it. Actors and politicians, who had, after all, asked for the scrutiny, did not live more public lives than Gwen and her mother did in their small world. Perhaps ordinary little Susie Jones could afford to be an odd duck; Gwen Wright could not. She was not supposed to have strange thoughts. She was supposed to be above all the petty emotions that plagued those less fortunate than she.

  When bright and shiny Jewel Fairchild came into her home, Gwen Wright was not supposed to feel insecure because the girl was so amazingly beautiful. Gwen was not supposed to envy that warm and easy smile that said Jewel was one of those who never met a stranger while it took Gwen months and sometimes years to decide she’d made a friend.

  Enough! said a voice inside Gwen’s head. If you keep on like this you’ll think yourself into one of those gray fogs that take days to climb out of. Go out into the fresh air. Get away from yourself.

  She left the bedroom, walked quickly down the long hallway to the wide curving staircase. At the bottom of the stairs she was met by undulating fur as Missy and Hank surrounded her. She let them out, then brought them back to the kitchen for their breakfast. They polished off the contents of their bowls, and then, having recognized her outfit as the one she wore when she was going outdoors, tried to follow her through the back door. But Gwen held them back.

  “Not this time, babies,” she said. “Now, Hank, don’t look at me like that. I’d take you with me in a minute, but I’m going up the hill and you know what you did the last time you came with me. I won’t have you bothering my little guys, you know.”

  So she left the dogs, barking canine pleas and indignation behind her, and walked outside.

  Chapter Six

  The land on which Cassandra’s home sat was well maintained but not manicured. There was a long lawn in the front of the house, a row of red maples that protected it from the road, and flower beds lining the front path in which daffodils, iris, and peonies bloomed in the spring to be followed by zinnias, daisies, daylilies, hollyhocks, and phlox in summer. In back of the house itself was another lawn that gave way to the surrounding forest of the area. In the spring violets and lilies of the valley carpeted the ground under a canopy of branches. In the autumn that same ground was carpeted again with the gold, red, and orange of the fallen leaves. The trees were pruned for safety’s sake but otherwise they were left to grow freely.

  The house itself was the kind of structure that would have been called a stately home if it had been listed in a guidebook. The artwork and priceless antiques inside it were the results of collecting done by four generations of a family with impeccable taste and the wealth to indulge that taste. Quite simply, when you were in that home, you were seeing civilization at its best. But once you went outdoors you felt you were in the woods—with all the beauty and simplicity that nature had to offer. Cassandra and her family had the best of both worlds.

  Behind the back lawn there was a hill. Halfway up it, beneath the oaks, the pines, and the thread of sunshine that seeped through a thickness of the undergrowth, there was a flat stump that provided a seat where one could comfortably settle down. This was Gwen’s destination—her special place where, as
everyone in the house knew, she was not to be disturbed. She’d been coming here since she was a child. Sometimes she came to read, usually classics that required concentration and peace, like books written by Dickens or Dostoyevsky. Sometimes she merely sat quietly, and watched the small creatures who lived there: the squirrels who barely disturbed the silence when they buried nuts, which they would find under the snow in winter. Or the chipmunks, who scurried in and out of their three-room apartments—one room for their babies, one for food storage, and the third one for what? Gwen had forgotten. It was because of these little creatures that she would not take Missy and Hank with her to her retreat on the hill; the dogs frightened them away.

  Gwen sat on the stump and prepared to enjoy the silence and the air and the companionship of the squirrels. Instead, another memory flooded back. But this was one she welcomed. She never tired of reliving it.

  * * *

  It had happened when she was sitting on this very stump—she had been six years old. A man had climbed up the hill to talk to her. His name was Walter Amburn, and Gwen would always believe that he had changed her life.

  Gwen had seen him before that day; for several months he had been coming to the house, mostly in the evenings, to escort her mother to various events. He was not a tall man—when Cassandra wore her high-heeled shoes, she was almost his height. His best feature was his hair, light brown and curly, although his nose was a bit too big for good looks and his eyes were too deep-set. But there was something about his face—something kind and humorous—that Gwen liked.