“How long might all that take?” Maud asked.
“Oh, a month at the most,” Miss Sly answered; then qualified: “A month at the most after I am convinced that you are sure.”
“It’s what I’ve prayed for,” Maud said. Tears stood in her eyes. “I’m no good with words, Miss Sly, but Morgan is. Please speak for me, Morgan,” she appealed.
But he could not, either for himself or for her—the condition of his thoughts being too deep, his world so suddenly altered, his view of it so brand new. All he said was: “We’ll be here Friday at ten.” He stood up, went around Miss Sly’s desk, took her extended hand and, then, because and just as, for her reasons, she had earlier felt inspired to do the extraordinary thing, so, now, he was inspired for his reasons to incline his head, downward, and to kiss her cheek. To this action, her response—in that she evidenced no sign of surprise and remained silent—was nothing short of queenly.
It was late afternoon when they left Miss Sly and started on the trip back to Hatherton. Traffic was heavy. In the main, the drivers of the cars were men, husbands and fathers (Morgan reasonably assumed) returning to their homes at this tail-end hour of the workday. The expression on most of their faces was a classless one of release heightened by anticipation: soon, for each, an arrival marked by the humbling, age-old renewals of spousal greetings and children’s kisses…. Such was the imagined ending he gave to their journeys, and in such way read in their faces his own future: saw himself as a soldier flanked by soldiers must see himself—as one of many, even as he feels in his breast the fervid beat of his own individual heart…. Ah, the astonishments of this day!…As he drove, he toiled with the issue of how and where to begin to approach what seemed to him to be a predestined reality into whose darkness of consequence, like a trusting blind man, he was allowing himself (and Maud) to be led…. And then he had a sudden image of himself as a thirteen-year-old reading Moby Dick for the first time. A picture. It was in February; he was house-bound with strep throat; outdoors, it was snowing. On a couch in his father’s library, covered by an eiderdown quilt, he lay supine, devouring the book, enraptured, innocent: innocent above all…. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike…. He read the sentence; read it again; then again. The words thrilled him, and under their influence he closed his eyes and conjured distant scenes of his life to come—scenes charged with extraordinary possibilities and great deeds—all already chosen by Fate for him and all just waiting for him in the run of his life to catch up to, and, as and when he did, in Fate’s name, as Fate’s servant, to faithfully fulfill.
…And now? Now he despaired at his lack of a determining faith by which he might account for all that had so suddenly, so incalculably befallen him. Infant twin girls! Had he been born twenty-nine years ago for them? Or had they been born three weeks ago for him? Like a deranged sailor who finds himself tied in the rope of his own knottings, he labored to free himself of the hold these questions had on him: worked his way in stages from the fastenings of perplexity to the sapphire lunacies of an extrinsic calm and from that calm to a kind of blasphemous merriment whose instantly recalled embodiment caused him to erupt into laughter. He caught his breath and in a voice that crackled with mirth, he said: “She’s incredible.”
Maud turned to him a charmed face and instantly affirmed: “Miss Sly.”
“The one and only,” he gleefully answered. “We’ve been had, my darling.”
“Royally,” she purred.
“And we’re done for. Absolutely done for.”
“Absolutely,” Maud agreed. Whereupon, she reached out and took his right hand from off the steering-wheel and carried it with a slow solemnity to her lips: “I’m so terribly happy, Morgan,” she said.
With something like a rush of pride, he assumed responsibility for her lack of need to call into question his own happiness. He only truthfully said: “So am I.”
Her linking smile was entire. As its witnessing partner, he fleetingly allowed himself the pleasure of glorying in it.
He dreaded going to bed that night. He was physically alert but emotionally exhausted. He anticipated hours of wakefulness and an early rising in a spent state to a day crammed with work assigned to him earlier in the week by Judge Malcolm, not a page of which he had as yet put thought or pen to. Imprisoned in the dark, he lay in the bed beside Maud’s dreaming body and waited, martyr-like, for the night’s torturings to begin. Yet he slept like a rock.
It was Maud’s touch on his arm that woke him. She was lying on her side, looking at him: “Hello—” she said quietly.
“Hello yourself…. What time is it?”
“Early. Sixish.” She pulled the blanket up over his shoulders. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh?”
“Shouldn’t we name one of them Caroline, in honor of your mother?”
Spoken in the dawn light, her words—how could he possibly have anticipated them?—struck him as fabulous. If at that moment a racing herd of wild horses, white and perfectly muscled and in their transient swiftness making of the air a whistle, were to be seen crossing the open spaces of his windowed view, he would not have been more overwhelmed: all his boyhood memories of his dead, greatly loved mother, he had shared with Maud: only with Maud…. In a voice thick with emotion, he said: “What a beautiful idea.”
“So—” Maud mused on: “Caroline for one. And the other?”
“Julia,” he instantly answered, not entirely out of the blue: it was a name he had always immensely liked.
Maud gave voice to the pairing: “Caroline and Julia.” Then, in reverse: “Julia and Caroline…. Perfection.”
He got out of bed. “I’ll be back,” he said.
It was the last time in their marriage that they made love with all the old, isolated, intact, clockless passion of their earliest encounters. When, on succeeding dawns, they would turn sexually to one another, it would not be as bold, confident invaders of a distant Eden, but as bound, abiding guardians of their imperfectly understood, imperfectly known earthly lives.
The world, Morgan came to understand, had found them out at last.
On Friday, as planned, they saw the twins.
In the Tilden-Herne nursery, in a double-crib, the sleeping infants lay side by side on their backs.
They bent over them and gazed at them and in hushed, festive voices, spoke of them. The one on the left they named Caroline; the one on the right, Julia. Caroline had a tiny, brown, raised freckle at the base of her left earlobe, without which distinguishing mark it would have been impossible to tell her from Julia. When the twins woke, one of the nurses said that now they could be picked up and fed. With a tender ease, Maud lifted Caroline from the crib.
“Mr. Shurtliff?”
It was the first time in his life an infant was held out to him with the certain understanding that he was to receive it and house it in his arms. Or, rather, arm—his left one—as Maud was seen doing, with the globe of the baby’s head nestled in the crook of her elbow, the diapered rump fitted into the shallow of her palm, the span of the fragile body connecting these two anatomical extremes accommodated—Lord!—somehow…. All as he was expected to do; all as he desired to do; all as—gracelessly, with a perilous pleasure—he somehow did. (Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated….) In his right hand he took the offered bottle and shyly touched its nipple to Julia’s mouth, then instantly laughed: he had seen puppies clamp like that with their jaws onto the teats of Dora, his father’s old coon-hound…. He stared into Julia’s face, impressed by her greed, enchanted by her pinkness, by the throb of a tendril-vein on her forehead, by her clear eyes, by the dwelling way she frowned at him. He had an urge to try out his voice on her, but the presence of three nurses and Miss Sly, who was standing off against the wall, viewing the proceedings with the calm, lit gaze of a lioness, acted upon his tongue as would a bit in the mouth of a horse. Not Maud, though, with her face bent down to Caroline’s, whi
spering a series of half-sung, half-spoken fooleries that drew from the baby a chain of smiles drowned in spittle.
…Long, long ago, the outcome had been fixed. Was deeply, deeply known….
Still: he sought Maud’s certain attention and said to her the given, single, ending word: “Yes.”
“Yes,” she whispered back to him; and again, with a celebrating passion: “Yes.”
He turned to Miss Sly as to a witness. She nodded without expression, then startled with: “The condition still pertains: You must take at least a week to be absolutely sure,” said with resolve, after which she smiled and glanced at her watch: “I must get back to my office…. But you stay as long as you like.”
“May I come with you for a moment?” Morgan asked.
“Indeed,” Miss Sly replied.
He told Maud he wouldn’t be long; he allowed her to believe his purpose in going with Miss Sly was the missioned one implicit in her eyes’ appeal: vow to her our decision.
As before, he sat opposite Miss Sly, who, as before, positioned herself behind her desk, from which place she looked at him with the full recognizing gaze of a practiced prelate. He all but expected her to say, “You have a confession to make….” And, in a sense, she did: “You’ve something of a personal nature on your mind,” she stated. And to his silent nod: “Am I correct in supposing it’s one you feel you can’t share with Mrs. Shurtliff?”
Neither her astuteness or frankness surprised him. “Yes,” he immediately replied: “It’s a concern I can’t seem to rid myself of.” He faltered: “I don’t know quite how to put it.”
“Don’t try to be eloquent,” she encouraged.
“Well,” he began: “it’s about the twins’ mother—that she must be dying of sorrow.”
Miss Sly sat straighter. A wary response, Morgan felt: protective: the equivalent of clutching tighter something concealed in the hand. Instantly he said: “I don’t want to talk about her. Truly. All I would like—and I appreciate that it might be difficult to do—is that somehow she be given to understand she is”—he hesitated, trying to find just the right word, then, somewhat sure, concluded—“acknowledged.”
Miss Sly sat, an immense presence, silent, for a frozen moment, then came to life and slowly put to him: “By whom acknowledged, Mr. Shurtliff?—” the words were posited not as a question but as a statement, gently, with genius: by saying his name, she spared him (he realized it at once) the blush of having to answer “Why, by me, of course.”
He lowered his head. He had not thought it through, had not seen that to have the twins’ biological mother “acknowledged” by him as their true progenitrix was to tacitly dispute the existence and workings of her own consciousness: that to add the surrogate conceits of his own mere sadness to the already scored sorrows of her intelligence, would be to apply salt to the rawness of an open wound. When finally he raised his head, his eyes engaged Miss Sly’s waiting gaze. “I understand the nature of my error,” he said simply. “Thank you for setting me straight.”
She was prompt in her response: “You owe me no thanks. You corrected yourself.”
He would remember afterwards the bond of her smile and how the wall clock ticking off the passing seconds did not act upon them as a prod, but as a complement to their established peace, “I mustn’t keep you any longer…. We’ll call you in a week’s time.”
She nodded. “Good-bye, Mr. Shurtliff.”
“Good-bye, Miss Sly.”
Wednesday, June 12, 1940, was their third wedding anniversary. By the odd workings of chance, it was also the scheduled day for the adoption hearing before Judge Morton Thayer…. They woke early, turned to each other with a companionate restraint, got out of bed and dressed, all very quickly, as if there were someone still asleep in the house whom they wished not to disturb. He saw how Maud’s hands shook when she poured their coffee. “We’ll win the day,” he told her. She disarmed him with a soft cry: “Oh, Morgan—” He held her and repeated: “We’ll win the day.” On the drive into Cleveland, they barely spoke.
Miss Sly was standing in the sunshine on the courthouse steps. They greeted her, then Morgan told her: “Today is our third wedding anniversary.”
She smiled. “So it’s a double red-letter day. What a nice coincidence.”
Mr. Jackson and Miss Avery joined them. Miss Sly took command: “Let’s go in,” she said with a touch to the armor of her starched blouse.
The hearing was formal and splendidly contained—an example, Morgan thought, of the law functioning at its cleanest, clearest best. Within half-an-hour all was over, the papers of consent in his briefcase—the proceedings capped by Judge Thayer’s barked “Congratulations,” tendered with a handshake first to Maud, then to himself. Maud wept. For the second time, Morgan kissed Miss Sly—and wondered: did tears always stand in her eyes on such similar occasions as had taken place under her aegis in these chambers? And again the notion seized him that she had some deep, ulterior, solemn interest in the matter of the twins’ fate—that, in truth, she had gambled all the cards in her hand on the successful outcome of this final play…. They urged her to have lunch with them, but she had a Tilden-Herne board meeting, she explained, so must, with regret, decline: “But I’ll see you when you come for the twins day after tomorrow. It’s at ten you’re coming, isn’t it?” She cocked her head to one side: “I’ll think of you tonight when I have my evening drink. Mine will be my usual dash of bourbon. I expect yours will be champagne. Oh—I mustn’t forget to tell you: my geese have four goslings. I’ve counted them through my field-glasses. You know the way they gawk their heads up out of the nest, looking about. Spying on me, I expect. Well—good-bye until day after tomorrow.”
(Emotionally, two days later, on Friday, June 14, for the first of countless times to come, they carried the twins over the threshold of their home. On that day too, half a world away, Hitler’s army entered Paris. Morgan heard the news of this event as, with a tyro’s awkwardness, he fitted a diaper around Caroline’s tiny, hipless body. The sorrowing authority of Ed Murrow’s voice reporting over the radio—a voice by now so familiar—brought a blur of tears to his eyes. By June 22—the day France accepted Germany’s terms of surrender—he had become an expert at the task of diapering.)
On Sunday afternoon, June 23, in the First Presbyterian Church of Hatherton, the twins were christened by the Reverend Mr. William M. Halliday. Family and friends stood shoulder to shoulder around the flower-bedecked baptismal font. Maud held Julia; Morgan, Caroline. Large-eyed and red-faced with excitement, the children of the Sunday School choir, under Miss Sara Moore’s direction, began the ceremony by singing “Oh, Happy Day,” followed by all the verses (memorized) of “Fairest Lord Jesus.”
Lucy Blackett was named godmother to both infants.
Geoffrey Barrows, Morgan’s friend from his Harvard law-school days, was named as Caroline’s godfather, and Peter Leigh, Maud’s cousin, as Julia’s.
Caroline Cunningham Shurtliff.
Julia Leigh Shurtliff.
Afterwards, at the christening party, Geoffrey charged Morgan with: “You used to be an Episcopalian.”
Morgan smiled: “Officially, I still am. But not here in Hatherton. For starters,” he went on, “there is no Episcopal church. It’s a given in these parts that if you’re gentry and a church-goer, it’s as a Presbyterian you worship.”
“So when in Rome—” Geoffrey interposed.
“Exactly.” They were alone for a few minutes in Morgan’s study.
“Does it ever come up as an adversative question? The Episcopal church versus the Presbyterian church?” Geoffrey asked.
“For me, personally, you mean? No. And it’s never remotely come up as an issue between Maud and me. She goes to church with a fair degree of regularity, and as often as not I go with her. The Reverend Mr. Halliday’s never sought to convert me and I’m always made to feel welcome at the services by him and the congregation. I suppose it’s possible they’re all just tolerating me pending
the day I see the Light on their terms.” Morgan paused, then laughed: “I did have one agonizing moment with Doctor Leigh when I was courting Maud—”
“I like him. He’s entertaining.”
“He is. He’s a damn good doctor, too. But it sure the hell wasn’t easy getting past him as a suitor to Maud.”
Geoffrey asked: “What was the agonizing moment?”
Again, Morgan laughed: “You have to bear in mind that it happened early on after I met Maud—the third or fourth time I called on her—I don’t remember which for sure. Doctor Leigh—not Maud—answered the doorbell. He took my coat and told me Maud would be down in a minute and meanwhile, if I’d come with him into the library, he’d show me a book I might find interesting. It was a cold winter night and there was a fire blazing in the hearth—all very cozy. Incidentally, the library in the Leighs’ house is an interesting room, paneled in oak, with a fine, elaborately carved mantel of flowers and vines and birds. If we have time tomorrow before you leave, I’ll take you to see it…. The book Doctor Leigh showed me turned out to be a history of Hatherton written by his father for the Pioneer Society. He told me I was welcome to borrow it and I thanked him, and then—I couldn’t help feeling he’d planned to do it—he began to reminisce about what he called his ‘growing-up years.’ I figured right off that it was his way of letting me know the rules he’d been taught to play by and, by imitation, they’d be the ones I’d be judged by as a suitor to Maud…. He began by telling me he’d been raised in a strict Presbyterian tradition—that on Sundays as a boy he’d only been allowed to read Fox’s Book of Martyrs and Gorman’s Bible Stories and that the only recreation permitted him was the putting together of jigsaw puzzles depicting such edifying scenes as the Taj Mahal, the British Houses of Parliament, the Eiffel Tower, and the Great Wall of China. Those were the only ones he mentioned that I remember…. Then he went on to say that it had been implanted in him to believe that, quote, all Democrats were unrespectable, all Methodists uneducated, all Catholics slaves to the pope, and as for the Episcopalians, the only thing its founders had succeeded in doing was to construct the largest needle with the largest eye through which the most camels could most comfortably pass. Unquote. All of which views,” Morgan continued on over Geoffrey’s guffaw, “he said he took for granted in precisely the same way he took for granted the cake of Babbit’s soap on the washstand in his room and the bottle of castor oil in the family medicine cabinet…. By the time he finished, my balls had withered to the size of sunflower seeds…. But I figured what the hell—I’d better bite the bullet and tell him then and there that I’d been reared as an Episcopalian, and do you know what he said? He said he should have guessed it from the fact that I wore shirts with unstarched collars.”
Matters of Chance Page 3
