“A beautiful baby,” Maud elaborated.
“Yes.”
“You look so pale.”
“Do I?” He laughed, and stood up and kissed her. “I’m terribly thrilled,” he said. Then: “Shall we take a picnic to the lake?”
“Yes.”
He went into the house to shave and dress. As he buttoned his shirt, two lines of a poem of de Vigny’s, memorized as a school-boy, came suddenly to mind:
I love the sound of the horn, at night, deep in the woods.
God! how sad is the sound of the horn deep in the woods.
The mirror into which he looked to check his appearance showed back to him his tears.
“We will have a child.”
Those words, so easily and confidently spoken, lowered a curtain on the experiencing of sensual pleasure for its own sake. Eagerly, they put themselves at the service of the profounder difference, uniquely their own for its ardor of desired consequence as much as, for its rapturous void, the other had been uniquely theirs.
(On Sunday, September 3, 1939, England and France went to war against Germany.
Morgan’s father was visiting him and Maud that weekend.
From that fateful hour two days before when Germany had invaded Poland, the radio had dominated their lives. As they listened to the transmitted announcement of England’s declaration of war, Morgan’s father began to sob. In the peaceful room, the sound, startling in the extreme, came out in three choked inhalations of despair followed by the wrung words: “My dear children…”
Morgan, cut to the core, remembered another day. “My darling boy—” his father had said, and, weeping, holding Morgan to him so tightly that the links of his gold watch-chain cut into Morgan’s cheeks: “Your mother is dead.” That had been long ago, when Morgan was twelve: it was the one other time he had seen his father so undone.)
1940
In January, the “verdict,” as Maud called it, was given by two specialists: they could have no children of their own.
At the hospital in Cleveland, at the conclusion of the final conference, the senior doctor of the team centered his attention on Maud: “Think about adopting a baby,” he advised. “In my opinion, the best agency is Tilden-Herne. It’s run by a remarkable woman. Tell her I sent you….” He wrote her name on a piece of paper which he handed, or tried to, to Maud, but she shook her head and refused to take it.
Morgan reached for it and slipped it into the breast-pocket of his suit.
The doctor continued to look at Maud: “If you should feel the need of some psychological help, Mrs. Shurtliff, I can refer—”
Maud, drawing on her coat, cut him off with: “That won’t be necessary.” She stood up and crossed the room and waited with her back to the door while Morgan went through the decent rites of departure.
“Let me hear from you,” were the doctor’s last words.
On the drive back to Hatherton, Maud slumped into the far corner of the car’s front seat, closed her eyes, and fell into a silence which Morgan, mired in the thick of his own thoughts, made no effort to break. But when they reached home, he told her: “You must come for a walk with me.” It was an order, the first of a few he ever gave to her.
She complied with a graceless shrug and fell into step at his side. In the field behind their house, in the chill of the sunless January afternoon, by the bend of the winter-running creek, she turned to him and wept in his arms: “My damn, deceiving body,” she cried.
“Don’t,” he told her deeply. “Don’t. It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” she said with a violent quietness; then, in a warning voice: “You’ll see. It will make a difference.”
“Tell me what we’re talking about,” he urged.
“My body,” she answered: “That it can’t do what it should.”
“Should? By whose decree? Surely not mine.”
She stiffened: “I’m sterile,” she said. “That’s really what’s on both of our minds, isn’t it?”
He put her from him: “Not on mine,” he answered, “and I resent the charge.”
“Don’t be lawyerly with me,” she threatened, “and don’t pretend on my account.”
“Pretend what?”
“That my being sterile doesn’t matter.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” he said, becoming angry. “As a matter of fact, I’m so far from pretending that I don’t mind telling you I think you’re behaving like a selfish fool.” He saw the stung look on her face: he had never come close to speaking to her like that; never imagined that he would. Sorrowing, he felt the lash swing back on himself. He watched for a moment the creek’s water, black and glistening, fringed, at its rapid middle flow, by a thin edging of ice. He turned back to Maud: “Please—” he said in an anguished voice, “we’re in this together.”
She met his gaze and under the sway of its appeal said: “Let me have a few minutes alone.” And, because he stayed: “I’m sorry, Morgan. More than anything I wanted to have your child.”
“As I wanted yours,” he answered, barely able to. “But we can’t, so let’s accept that we can’t and go on.” He remembered then—even smiled—and with his right hand delved through the stuff of his muffler and overcoat and drew out from his suit pocket, the piece of paper. “Voila!” he said, waving it in the air, the very ass of an amateur magician: “‘The Tilden-Herne Adoption Agency, Miss Zenobia Sly.’”
“What?” Maud asked with the first rise of a spontaneous laugh he’d heard from her in days: “What was that name?”
“Sly,” he replied, and spelled it out: “S-L-Y. Miss Zenobia Sly.”
“Imagine going through life with a name like that.”
Her laughter encouraged him: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to give the lady a call?”
She sobered instantly: “Would an adopted child please you as much as our own?”
“Is the moon made of green cheese?” he shot back at her. “Oh, Maud, for God’s sake—try.”
“Give me a few days,” she said.
But he knew it was his chance, so pled his case: “You’ve put the question to me, so you must hear my answer, and it’s ‘yes.’ Yes, I can imagine being pleased by and loving an adopted child as much as I would our own. Maybe even more.”
She visibly brightened. “At least,” she said, “we can choose its gender.” Then: “A boy,” she thought aloud: “I’d like a boy.” And then, with a gesture that undid him, she took off her gloves and put her naked hands in his. “Thank you, Morgan,” she said.
Starting in February, separately and together, week in and week out, they were scrutinized and exhaustively interviewed and their home minutely inspected by staff-members of the Tilden-Herne Adoption Agency.
“What’s left for them to consider?” Maud asked of Morgan at the end of yet another wearying meeting.
“My tonsils,” Morgan answered with a wry smile. “They haven’t checked yet to see if I’ve had them out.”
“Oh, Morgan—” she lowered her head. “What if we fail at this?”
All in a few weeks’ time, she had lost the confidence that had so distinguished her. “We won’t fail,” he told her.
“What makes you so sure?”
“It’s gone too far.”
“What’s gone too far?”
“Their interest in us,” he answered.
“But how much longer do you think it will be before they tell us something definite?”
“I don’t know, Maud. I don’t know how they think or how they work.” He considered for a moment, then: “Meanwhile, we shouldn’t talk about it so much, don’t you agree?”
She nodded. “Yes…I’ll try harder not to.”
“I said we,” he corrected.
“I heard you.”
“Maud.”
Thenceforth they practiced that brand of patience which shows in the faces of people who wait hourly in the thirst of drought for the coming of rain.
With Lucy Blackett as her teacher, Maud
took up needlepoint. The close work sent her to the oculist for her first pair of glasses. In them, she looked older, more serious, more determinedly independent. “The new me,” she knowingly said of herself the first time she wore them in Morgan’s presence…. For himself, he went back to reading: during the prolonged, absorbed season of his bridegroomship, he had fallen away from the habit and came back to it now with a sense of thanksgiving. To read of the lot and destinies of others and of the tests they were put to and triumphed over or failed at, made him feel about his own life less amazed, less anxious, less—(he shied from the word for its hint of betrayal to Maud, but it persisted in his thoughts)—hermetic.
At last, in mid-May (they all but trembled as they read it), a letter came summoning them to appear the following Wednesday before the still unmet, by now fabled Miss Zenobia Sly.
(“Miss Sly makes the final decision,” one of the staff had told them. Another had warned: “Everything depends on Miss Sly.”)
“Come in,” Miss Sly greeted them, holding open her office door: “Do please sit down.”
She was of average height, in her fifties, large-boned, stamina-stout, oddly graceful in her movements and, Morgan judged by one look into her clear blue eyes, extremely shrewd. The top of her head was crowned by a horse’s-tail length of coarse brown hair wound into an immense, slip-shod bun through the center of which were speared, geisha-like, the sharpened lengths of two red-lacquered Tilden-Herne pencils.
Morgan found her fascinating.
She took her place at her desk, where, from a mercilessly straight, wooden-backed, uncushioned chair, she wordlessly stared first at him, then at Maud, before declaring: “My staff and I have met several times over your case…. We are all very impressed by your qualifications as adoptive parents.” (In response to Maud’s smile, Morgan thought he detected a slight easing of her mouth’s firm set.) “You’ve specified your wish for a male infant,” she went on, and, at their nods: “There’s a long waiting list for male infants. A very long list. It will take time.”
“How long do you think?” Morgan ventured to ask.
“At least a year, Mr. Shurtliff.”
“Damn,” Maud let slip.
Miss Sly took up her pen. “Take heart,” she said. “As of this moment, your name has been added to the list. That’s already a great advance.”
“A year is such a long time,” Maud said.
“Not when you’re my age,” Miss Sly tartly rebutted. “And remember, I said at least a year. It could be longer, but I’m sure no more than sixteen months at the outside.”
Morgan said: “It’s a comfort to know we’re on the list. We’re grateful for that, Miss Sly.”
“Indeed you are on the list, and I promise you that in time you will have your boy.”
But Maud, terrier-like, persisted: “Is there a chance—a chance that it might be sooner?”
Miss Sly appeared to soften: “I do wish I could tell you otherwise, but I don’t see how it could be possible, given the length of the list. I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Shurtliff.” Having dealt the blow, she did then what Morgan thought was very strange: she got up from her desk and with a kind of mighty languor wandered over to the window and looked out and up, into the branches of a maple tree whose furled, rust-colored leaf-buds were just beginning to open against the May sky. “It’s lovely to see Nature come alive again after such a long winter as we’ve had,” she mused as idly as a guest at a tea party: “I do so enjoy the spring, don’t you?”
Morgan smiled and said a prompt “Yes” Maud but nodded.
“My house is on a pond,” she went on in a vague, contemplative way, “a small pond, but large enough to accommodate a pair of geese that come back every year to nest and rear their young. They afford me no end of pleasure.”
“My father,” said Morgan, “always speaks of wild geese as being the whales of the sky.”
“What a very intriguing image!” Miss Sly smiled over it. She hesitated, then: “An idea’s just struck flint in my brain—”
Morgan laughed: “That’s a wonderful phrase—”
“It’s one my father was given to using,” Miss Sly responded.
“And the idea, Miss Sly?”
“Ah, well—” Again she hesitated, but now she narrowed her eyes.
“What?” Morgan urged.
She prolonged the silence—allowed it to positively settle in—nearly, Morgan felt, as if she needed to, or more, as if whatever she was considering depended on its certain drama. Then with a light, melancholy laugh, she broke it: “No…I see now the folly of the idea.” And briskly, dismissingly: “It wouldn’t do…. I can’t, as I think on it, really suppose you’d be in the least bit interested.”
“In—what?” Morgan earnestly insisted.
“In…twins, Mr. Shurtliff.”
“Twins?” He gasped.
“Twins,” Maud breathed, sitting straighter.
“Immediately available.” Miss Sly’s voice was made of silk.
“Twins,” Maud said again.
“Twin…girls,” Miss Sly amended.
“Twin girls,” Maud echoed.
Morgan heard in her voice the note of wonder, of tremendous attraction, and turned to her, expecting to meet her eyes, but she was staring off, sitting absolutely still, her face suffused by a calm cast of womanliness heretofore unknown to him, the very strangeness of which immeasurably moved him and equally anguished him, as, almost at once it came clear to him that for her, just then, he did not exist. What saved him—saved, that is, his own dignity in his own eyes at that critical moment, was a certain obstacle in his character to self-pity; that, and, at the same time, the suddenly seen, suddenly experienced sense of himself as being, in the truest, garnering sense of the word, a husband. And so, at once, he determined to take from himself the dare of his calling, and, with his eyes in Miss Sly’s waiting ones, he said: “My wife must of course speak for herself”—peripherally, he saw Maud, in the quickest way, turn in her chair and face him—“but as far as I’m concerned, I find the idea of twin daughters very appealing.”
Instantly, the orderly room suffered the commotion of Miss Sly’s upflung arms and incantatory cry of, “Splendid! Splendid!”—at the same time Maud exclaimed, “Morgan, so do I!” and delivered upon him an embrace so flung in its gladness that his chair teetered and threatened a backward fall, a disaster he averted by a jogo-like forward thrust of his body, which agile deed obliged the chair, somewhat against its will, to finally right itself.
“My soul, Mr. Shurtliff!” Zenobia Sly declared. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” Morgan laughed. “I think so.”
“Isn’t it astonishing the way things work out?” Miss Sly exclaimed.
“Astonishing,” Maud trilled.
Like a proud ship under full sail, Miss Sly moved back to her desk: “You’ll want to see the twins as soon as possible.” She consulted her date-book: “What about the day after tomorrow? That’s Friday. At ten. Is that convenient for both of you?…Good. Come here to my office: I’ll go up to the nursery with you.”
Maud’s excitement was palpable: “How old are they?” she asked.
“Three weeks next Saturday,” Miss Sly replied, “and they are beautiful…. But you’ll see for yourselves.” Then, her mood shifted and, in the shift, her eyes took on a darker cast: “I’m sure my staff has apprised you of the policy of confidentiality we practice here at Tilden-Herne as regards the biological mothers of the children we put up for adoption. It’s a policy we believe to be psychologically sound and humanly decent—so, normally, I never speak to prospective adopting parents about the biological mother, but in this case—” she hesitated, reflected, made her decision, and went on: “in this case, I feel inspired”—Morgan loved the antique, lit way she stressed the word—“to share with you my knowledge of her character as being, in every sense, fine. Exceptionally fine,” she concluded with a keen ardor.
Morgan, moved by the force of her sincerity, said: “
It’s very good of you to tell us this. It’s a valuable thing to know.”
But Maud brought her hands tightly together and held them so, defiantly: “I have absolutely no interest in the twins’ biological mother,” she said. “None at all.” Her voice was petulant, tainted, Morgan thought, by jealousy.
He lowered his head, and from that posture of near dismay, heard Miss Sly’s unruffled reply: “Yours is a quite usual and thoroughly healthy attitude, Mrs. Shurtliff…. We will speak no further of the matter.” She adjusted the cuff of her blouse. Then: “It’s understood of course that until you’ve seen the twins and had time to talk fully between yourselves about the undertaking of parenting them, I won’t consider you to be in the least bit committed. You might, I mean, as you come to review all the ramifications, go back to your initial desire for an infant boy.”
“No!” Maud broke in: “That’s not possible now.”
“My dear, long experience has taught me that nothing is impossible,” Miss Sly countered.
But Maud, intent, disallowed the remark: “Please,” she began: “I’m dying to know how soon—when—might we have the twins?”
“Well, Mrs. Shurtliff, let me think a moment…. You’ll see them day after tomorrow. Then, over the next week or so, you must think in depth and search your hearts in order that you be sure you want these infants. When and if you are sure, you must call me and come again to see me. Then, providing the three of us are in complete accord, the legal process can be set into motion. Our Mr. Jackson is in charge of that. He will draw up and submit the necessary documents to the court. The court will receive those documents and, in due course, a hearing will be scheduled at which you will both appear in company with myself and Mr. Jackson and one of our staff members. That will be Miss Avery, in all likelihood. The court rarely denies a petition of adoption brought before it by an authorized agency of good repute. In my tenure as head of Tilden-Herne, an instance of refusal has never occurred.” (She said the last words with a show of pride.) “And that’s it! The adopting parents leave the court with the papers of adoption in hand, which papers free them to claim and take home the child—in this case, the children—as their own, for life.”
Matters of Chance Page 2
