Crossroads

by Belva Plain

  “She doesn’t like me, Gwen, you know that.”

  “And you return the favor, dear!” Gwen had given him a playful kiss on the cheek, so happy she didn’t care that he was reluctant to go. She was going to escape the city for a whole long glorious day! The sun was shining, there were a dozen different shades of blue in the sky, from azure to turquoise, and she was going to see trees, and grass—acres of it.

  * * *

  Cassie had gotten down to business as soon as the omelets had been served. “Stanley, I want to buy a house for you and Gwen,”she said. The family was sitting in the dining room where Gwen could see her old refuge through the window, and she’d been drinking it in and thinking that the hillside had never looked more lovely, but when Cassie spoke, she turned in time to see Stan stiffen and she knew what was coming next. So did Cassie.

  “Before you say no, hear me out,” she went on. “The house I’m proposing to buy is in a new development out here. You probably saw it from the road as you drove by; the construction is ecologically sound and the prices are reasonable.”

  “It’s very kind, but no thank you,” Stan said.

  But Gwen was remembering the development. The houses are small, she thought, but they are beautifully designed—rustic and simple. And there is land around each of them. Real land!

  “Gwen and I are planning to buy a house when we have enough saved,” Stan said.

  “And how close are you to being able to do it?” asked Cassie

  If the development is the one I think it is, Gwen went on thinking, and it has to be, because it is the only new one in the area, each of the houses has almost an acre. There are trees that haven’t been chopped down at the edge of each property line. If you owned one of those houses you could imagine you were living in a forest.

  “We would have the money for a down payment right now, but the landlord who owns the building where my shop is decided he wanted to sell, and I’m buying it. I have one more installment to go.” There was a defensive tone in Stan’s voice that Gwen had never heard before. “It was too good a deal to pass up.”

  “Stanley, please, there’s no need to explain any of this to me,” Cassie said. “I’m not judging you, I simply want to give you a gift.”

  “A very expensive gift—no matter how much you say it isn’t—and we can’t take it.”

  “I can well afford it, I assure you.”

  “I know you can.”

  And if we did let her give it to us, I could plant a garden, with roses that won’t die, Gwen thought.

  But Stan was talking again. “Gwen and I are not the first couple who will have to wait until we can afford to buy our home on our own,” he said. “We’re no better than anyone else in our situation.”

  “But Gwen isn’t in your situation, as you call it. She has a family that can do this for her. Why should she wait if she doesn’t have to?”

  Yes, oh, yes! Why should we wait a minute longer than we have to?

  “I didn’t marry Gwen’s family, I married her. And I will provide for her.”

  “You married a young woman who is accustomed to a certain lifestyle. You can’t think that she’s enjoying living in that apartment.”

  And then Stan turned to her. “What about it, Gwen?” he asked. “Is it so bad living the way we do?”

  Oh Stan, I love you. So very much. But we could have trees and fresh, clean air, and I could plant roses. We could have a dog like Missy, who is lying on your feet right now because she knows how much you love animals. The words were on the tip of her tongue, but then she looked at his face. And she saw how important this was to him. “No, it’s not that bad,” she said.

  But on the way back home in the car, she couldn’t help herself. “Why couldn’t we take Mother’s offer?” she demanded. “If she wants to give us a present, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Your mother wants to keep her hold on you, Gwen. That’s what this is about.”

  “No, it’s about you being stubborn as a mule!” She had never said anything like that to him before and they were both surprised.

  “Your mother has no respect for me—and she lets me know it every chance she gets. How do you think I’d feel letting her pay for the roof over my head? Gwen, you can’t want that!”

  She didn’t. She didn’t want him to lose his dignity or his self-respect. So she tried to make the best of it. She decided to get a job. It would get her out of the hated apartment, there would be people to talk to, and she would earn a little money to add to the down payment fund. She began looking. And quickly discovered how few options there were for someone with neither a college degree nor any skills. That was something she’d never thought about when she had so cavalierly thrown away her chance at a Yale education. She probably could have asked Cassie to find something for her to do at the glassworks, but she was sure Stan would say that was the same thing as letting her mother pay for their house. So Gwen continued her frustrating job search. But in a perverse way that she realized was totally unreasonable, she found herself blaming Stan for it. She was ashamed of herself for feeling that way, and resolved to try even harder to make the best of her plight. In a way, it was that resolution which led—indirectly—to everything else that happened.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  As a part of her new positive approach, Gwen began going down to the courtyard behind her apartment building each morning when she looked through the “help wanted” section of the paper. Being outdoors in the fresh air would help her attitude, she told herself. It didn’t have the desired effect, but something else did. Gwen soon discovered that several of the baby-sitters working for her neighbors brought their charges down to the dark little courtyard to play, and she quickly fell in love with the children. In her mind she named them; there was a baby boy she dubbed the Adventurer. His little fat feet encased in tiny sneakers, he tottered across the small patch of grass like Columbus discovering the New World. The Thinker was a sweet baby girl, whose little round face was usually topped with a pink headband and bow. She was content to spend a quarter of an hour at a time in her carriage contemplating the universe—and her own tiny fingers.

  Watching the children, Gwen would let the “help wanted”section drop to the ground. A second hunger—as strong for the need for the country—was born in her.

  “Don’t you think it’s time we started thinking about having a family?” she asked Stan one night when they were lying next to each other.

  “Let’s wait until we’re in our house first,” he’d said.

  “That’s going to take so long. I don’t want to wait.”

  “Well, I guess there’s nothing that says we can’t get a head start,” he’d said, as he reached for her. After that, all practical considerations were forgotten. And when after a few months Gwen discovered she was pregnant, Stan was as overjoyed as she was. So she prepared to be blissful.

  She hadn’t counted on feeling so awful. She knew about morning sickness, but her nausea lasted all day. It didn’t help that it was summertime and they were in the middle of one of the worst heat waves in Wrightstown history. The air that hung over the city was so thick it was hard to breathe. The heat rose up from the concrete sidewalks, and the traffic was angrier and louder than usual.

  “Get exercise,” the doctor told Gwen. “Walking is best.” So she walked every day to a small shopping center in the heart of town. It was air-conditioned, a necessary evil given the heat, and it wasn’t very busy, so Gwen could circle the perimeter without bothering anyone. Round and round she went and tried to not to think about the way it felt to walk on a country road when you could stretch your arms out into open space and sing and no one would hear. She also tried not to think about the phlox and peonies she would have planted in her garden if Stan had been willing to accept the house her mother had wanted to buy for them. Something deep and primitive in her said that her baby needed a garden. It needed space and singing. But she couldn’t give it that. So she walked in the shopping center. And she had her
reward when the baby moved.

  Stan was with her when it happened the first time, and they had looked at each other with the time-honored wonder that only parents can know.

  “It’s sending us a message,” Gwen said. “It’s saying ‘I’m here.’ ” And the baby was real to her in a whole new way. She and Stan picked out two names, one for a boy and one for a girl, since they hadn’t wanted to know what sex the child was. They selected Michael and Abigail. There was no reason; they were just names that sounded good to both of them.

  Then something occurred to Gwen. “Whenever I wonder what the baby will look like, I always think about you and me,” she told Stan. “I think, Will it have Stan’s nose and my mouth? His hair or mine? But what if it looks like . . . someone else?”

  “You’re talking about your father.”

  “And my birth mother. Will my baby look like that woman I’ve never seen? Will it have her eyes? At least I’ve seen his picture, so I’ll know if it takes after him.”

  Stan had taken her in his arms and whispered, “No matter who it looks like, it will be a part of them. Those two people you never got to know.”

  Gwen had whispered back, “I’ll be giving them a new life. I’ll be able to do that for them!”

  The nausea stopped after the baby moved. Suddenly Gwen was full of energy; she made over the second bedroom into a nursery, painting it a happy, gender-neutral yellow. Cassie had given Gwen a gift certificate to the most exclusive infants’ shop in town, and Stan didn’t say a word when expensive, state-of-the-art baby paraphernalia started showing up at the apartment. Their child was more important to him than his pride. Gwen couldn’t remember when she’d been happier.

  “I thought being with you in Paris was the best time I would ever have in my life, but I’m afraid Little Whosis has beaten you out,” she told Stan one night as they were drifting off to sleep.

  “That’s Little Mike or Little Abby to you, lady,” he murmured, and without opening his eyes, he gave her belly a pat.

  Then suddenly everything was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. There was no more movement inside her and Gwen knew, with a terrifying primitive knowledge that she couldn’t explain, that the messages from the baby stopped. Stan rushed her to the obstetrician, where they begged the woman to say that everything was all right, that this was normal, that Gwen was just having some kind of first-time-mother panic attack and that she was imagining things. Tests were run to try to prove that what Gwen felt in her bones and her blood wasn’t true, that she was wrong. But she wasn’t wrong.

  Finally the word was said. “Stillborn.” Their baby daughter—she was a little girl—would never see her yellow nursery or the brightly colored mobile that was hanging over her crib. She would never wear a pink hair bow and she would never grow up to play the violin, or be president of the United States, or just be a happy, loving woman. Stillborn. All the dreams and hopes and joy died with that word.

  I failed you, Abby, and I failed Stan. I failed myself, Gwen thought when she was told. And then after a long shuddering moment:And I failed those two people who died too young in a car wreck outside New Orleans. This baby was to have been their legacy and I failed them.

  * * *

  The room was hot. Gwen opened her eyes and looked at her watch. It was almost noon, she’d been sitting in the chair in her bedroom for over an hour. She had to get dressed.

  “Don’t try to push yourself too hard,” the doctor had said. “Remember you need time to grieve. It’s only been two weeks.”

  Two weeks since they took my baby. My little Abby. I should have given her a garden. I should have seen to it that she had space and fresh air and trees and grass. I knew that was what she needed. And crazy though it was—and Gwen really did know it was crazy—there was a part of her that believed her baby would have lived if she and Stan had had their own house with their own land.

  She got up out of the chair and walked to the window to turn on the hated air conditioner. They’d done a Caesarean when they took the baby and she had spent two nights in the hospital. When she came home, Stan had dismantled the nursery. He had painted the walls a soft taupe, and gotten rid of the furniture from the fancy baby shop. Gwen had never asked him what he’d done with it. Their nursery was now a guest bedroom.

  She couldn’t bear to be with people after she came home. Well-wishers had tried to be comforting. “You and your husband are young, you’ll get through this,” they said, or, “Just remember, God never sends a bigger burden than we can carry,” or worst of all, “You’ll have other children.”

  Mercifully Cassie had known better than to try to help with words, but she had offered to send Gwen and Stan on a vacation cruise. “The ship is beautiful, I’ve taken it myself,” she said. “Get away from everything for a while. You need a change of scenery.”

  But changing the scenery wouldn’t bring Gwen’s baby back, and the mere thought of sitting on the deck of a ship with nothing to do but think was intolerable. Gwen said no thank you.

  Stan had stayed home with her after she’d come back from the hospital, and he had tried to talk to her about their loss. But her husband had never been one for putting his feelings into words. She was the one who had done that, but now she had nothing to say. The truth was, the crazy part of her mind blamed Stan for not accepting the house her mother had offered. She didn’t want to feel that, knew how unfair and wrong it was, but she couldn’t help it. Finally, after three days, she told him she was feeling better and he should go back to work. Perhaps it was just her imagination but she thought he’d been relieved.

  Then last night he’d said to her, “Get dressed tomorrow and I’ll take you to lunch. You need to get out of the house.”

  And she had screamed at him, “We don’t have a house. We have this goddamned apartment.”

  Stan had looked as if she’d shot him.

  * * *

  Gwen moved to the closet. She knew how much she had hurt Stan. That was why, this morning, even though he hadn’t mentioned lunch again, she’d decided to go to his shop at noon and surprise him. She started pulling clothes out of the closet. She had to get dressed sometime.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Amber office building sat on the northwest corner of the busiest intersection in Wrights town. It fronted on the city’s main thoroughfare, unimaginatively named First Street. The cross street was Wright Boulevard. If you walked south on Front Street for about a quarter of a mile, you’d find yourself in the older, less affluent part of Wrights town. If you started at The Amber and went north, your journey would end in a small park. Wright Boulevard stretched out to the suburbs to the east and if you were to take the number 6 bus going west, you’d eventually wind up at the Wright Glass works—as did many of the company’s employees who lived in this up-and-coming neighborhood.

  The intersection of First and Wright was one of the few areas of Wrights town where people actually walked, and Jeff enjoyed standing at his window in The Amber sixteen floors above the street to watch the pedestrians bustle to and fro. It reminded him of New York, which was probably his favorite city in the States.

  He had favorite cities worldwide now, was enough of a regular visitor to London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Beijing, and Okinawa that there were hotel concierges and headwaiters in all of those places who knew which suite was Mr. Henry’s favorite, and which wine he preferred. JeffSon had continued to grow—as it had had to, to hold off the waiting sharks. Now the little business that had started out as a small natural gas company in Omaha, Nebraska, was a conglomerate of gas lines and power plants involved in the transmission and distribution of power around the globe. JeffSon’s lawyers dealt with the legal infrastructure and rules in at least a dozen countries. Along the way the business had also acquired, almost by accident, a bundle of communications companies. The opportunity had presented itself out of the blue, and Jeff had had to move quickly. It had been a little too fast for his comfort, and he’d hesitated, almost until it was too late, but at th
e last second, on the advice of several of the young Turks he’d hired to advise him, he had taken the plunge. Corners had been cut, and research he would normally have insisted was necessary had not been done, but they had been lucky and JeffSon’s bottom line had benefited exponentially. Jeff had learned a lesson from that experience: that there are times when you cannot listen to that little voice in your gut that is telling you that what you are about to do is too risky. There are times when you have to listen to the youngsters you’ve brought on board straight out of business school who know how to gamble better than you do. And then you pray.

  He was ignoring that little voice in his gut again these days. Because JeffSon was poised to involve itself in a new area—the water utility market. For this move, which even the gambling young Turks admitted was risky, he had done his homework as much as he could. But at a certain point you just had to go for broke.

  Beware of Faustian bargains, Jeffie, his father had said.

  Jeff shook his head to clear it. This was no time to think about his father’s antiquated notions. He started to turn away from the window, when down on the street below, he saw Gwen Wright . . . only her last name was something else now . . . coming out of her apartment building.

  It was his wife, Jewel, who had first told him that the former Miss Wright had married a man who owned some kind of service shop and she now lived in the center of downtown Wrightstown across the street from The Amber. For some reason Jewel always seemed to know what was going on with the Wright family, especially Gwen.

  When Jewel had first mentioned Gwen’s name, Jeff hadn’t been sure who she was talking about. Then he had remembered the party he’d attended at the Wright house and the quiet girl whose birthday it had been. That night—Was it really four years ago?—he’d thought that there was something a little otherworldly about the party’s honoree, but it could have been the old-fashioned white lace dress she’d been wearing. He had pegged her as one of those introverted young women who were probably interesting if you wanted to spend an enormous amount of time getting to know them, but he didn’t. She was not his type and anyway, back in those days he hadn’t had much time for anyone but himself.