Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  FIVE QUESTIONS. Copyright © 2001 by Kitty Burns Florey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2507-8

  First eBook Edition: July 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Question One:

  Who Were You Then?

  Question Two:

  What Made You Happy?

  Question Three:

  Why Did You Run Away?

  Question Four:

  Why Did You Return?

  Question Five:

  Who Are You Now?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to:

  Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle, agents from heaven with the patience of saints; Ron Savage, for all our after-dinner talks; Katherine Florey, for her witty insights; Jude Balsamo, for inspiration and support; Karen Kleinerman, for her brilliant e-mails; and Bob Flavell, for the fish.

  Prologue

  Please?”

  We are sitting on the roof terrace on a September evening. The roses are in full bloom, and beyond them, over the river, the sky is aflame: vermilion, peach, fuschia, livid pink.

  “Well?”

  I can’t answer yet.

  “Please? As a favor to me?”

  “Does the world really need another memoir?”

  “It’s not for the world.” There is a long pause, then, finally: “It’s for me. Because I want to understand. I want answers. Why you were who you were. Why you did what you did.”

  I can’t stop looking west. I can’t resist these sunsets, no matter how many I see, how many I have painted. Each one is different. The pinks blaze against deep blue; the Hudson gleams pewter with jolts of silver. Across the river, the lights begin to blink on.

  “Or think of it this way. It’s for posterity.”

  I turn away from the view then. Our eyes meet, and we look steadily at each other. Far below us, a car alarm goes off and halts midscream. “Okay.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You will?”

  “I will.”

  I don’t say that the prospect of writing it all down both terrifies and excites me. Like flying over the ocean. Like an empty canvas. Like childbirth.

  “Promise?”

  I look out over the river. The sky is already different, darkness overtaking the highest shreds of cloud.

  “Promise?”

  Fasten the seat belt. Pick up the brush. Breathe deeply.

  “Yes. I promise.”

  Question One

  Who Were You Then?

  Oddly, when I look back on that time, the Edna Quinlan Home is the first thing I see—not my own face, or Suzanne’s, or even my mother’s with its disappointed frown, but the melancholy brick house on Beacon Street. I still dream about that place. I was there less than four months, but in those dreams it’s vivid, solid, stored securely in my memory all these years. I’m going up the stone steps and through the ponderous door into the hall (warped mirror, scuffed bench, tangle of galoshes), I’m climbing the wide oak staircase to the second floor, I’m opening the last door on the left, the one with what looks like the mark of a hatchet blade dug deeply into the wood. . . .

  My room contained two lumpy beds with stained greenish bedspreads that roughly matched the faded drapes. The two windows looked out on the backyard. I arrived in late December, and by April I was gone, so all I ever saw out those windows was snow, a wire fence, the back wall of the market around the corner, the peeling clapboards of the garage next door—a winter scene as relentlessly gray and white and black as one of my mother’s photographs but, except for a few mornings of slanting sunlight after a snowfall, much less pleasing to the eye.

  There were twelve of us. I roomed with Suzanne Lombard from Vermont. She was just my age, with a round face and long black hair, and she was enormous.

  “They think it’s twins,” she said. She told me that the day I met her, and her eyes were perfectly expressionless. A week later, when we had become friends, she said it again, and this time she broke down and sobbed. “Twins!” she said. “Twins! It’s so special to have twins! What am I doing, giving them away? I must be crazy! Oh God, I don’t know what to do!”

  I loved Suzanne because she said what was in my mind, and she listened to me. The fact that I was carrying a real live individual in my big belly—the most important thing about being pregnant, it seemed to me—was something I hadn’t been able to discuss with anyone else, not with my friend Marietta, not with the social worker—and especially not with my mother. The staff at Edna Quinlan concentrated mainly on our day-to-day health; my mother on life after pregnancy.

  When I met Suzanne, she was seven months along, and tormented by the kicking of her twins. We both slept badly. Once in our beds, we would turn out the light and whisper. We speculated about what our babies would look like. We shared what we knew about adoption, pro and con. We talked about how we felt when we found out we were pregnant, about the babies’ fathers, about what we hoped for someday when we would become mothers for real. Sometimes we cried together, and sometimes we would reach across the space between our two beds and grip each other’s hands, but there was no comfort for us.

  Suzanne had brought with her a copy of a book containing photographs of the fetus at different stages. Such things were discouraged at the Edna Quinlan Home, where pregnancy was treated like a bad case of flu, something to be gotten over. But Suzanne and I studied the pictures compulsively, furtively, as if they were pornography. I was terrified by those wet, serene fetuses with their huge closed eyes, their fingers spread, their vague sex organs. They were so horribly real. They made me profoundly miserable. And yet I looked at them all the time.

  Suzanne was gone by the end of February. She began having labor pains in the middle of dinner one night, and toward midnight they took her to the hospital in a blizzard. We weren’t allowed to visit each other, and I didn’t see her again until she came back to Edna Quinlan to get her things. Her mother was with her, a nervously smiling woman in a hurry. Suzanne’s big stomach had disappeared, but she looked puffy and unhealthy.

  “How was it?” I asked her.

  That blank look was in her eyes. “How the hell do you think it was?” she asked. “It was exactly how I thought it would be, only worse.”

  Her mother, from across the room, said, “Suzanne.”

  “I heard it really was twins.”

  “Boys,” she said. Her voice was belligerent. “Two boys. Identical.”

  I put a hand on her arm. “Suze—”

  She turned away. “I’ve got to pack and get out of here,” she said.

  Time crawled by those last two months. The Edna Quinlan Home worked hard at keeping us busy: That had been one of its attractions for my mother. “They don’t give you time to mope,” she had said. This wasn’t true, of course. I could always find time; I could mope anywhere. But Miss Parnell, the impatient, disappointed-looking woman who ran the place, posted a formidable schedule of activities on the bulletin board every week. We did school assignments. We went to art classes and learned to use a sewing machine. We listened to lectures on birth control and did exercises so we’d get our figures back. We learned the Lamaze method. We took field trips to
museums and walked the Boston Freedom Trail in stared-at groups of six. We helped with the cooking, and after dinner at night we played Twenty Questions and watched our allotted two hours of television. Sometimes we were shown educational movies on Australian aborigines or the Nova Scotia fishing industry.

  In between, and during, and afterward, and lying in bed at night, I moped. We all moped. There were times when the stench of misery at the Edna Quinlan Home was as inescapable as the pine-scented air freshener in the bathrooms.

  After Suzanne, my new roommate was a silent black girl named Darcy who would sit in bed in her underwear making tiny slits in her arms with a razor blade, then pressing a tissue to the cuts until the blood stopped, staring dreamily into space and rocking back and forth. The first time she did it I stared at her in horror, but all she said to me was, “Don’t tell.”

  I had no intention of telling, but I tried to talk to Darcy—not about her cuts but about anything: the weather, sewing class. I missed Suzanne desperately, and I needed a friend, and Darcy, God knows, obviously needed something. But she was locked in her own world, and after lights out I lay awake alone, listening to Darcy’s asthmatic breathing, feeling the baby kick, getting up every couple of hours to empty my bladder. I spent long hours alone in my room with the fetus book—Suzanne had left it behind—looking at the pictures, or staring out the window at the dirty snow, or reading long novels about other troubles than my own.

  I went into labor on a Sunday night in April. I was in my room, reading War and Peace. I was at the part where Natasha goes to the ball in her white muslin dress with the pink ribbons—her first long dress—and dances the mazurka with Denisov.

  My due date was a week away, and I was exhausted, morose, sick to death of my monstrous belly. Natasha, to my relief, refused Denisov’s proposal of marriage, but said she hoped they could still be friends. I had just reached the end of Book One when the first stab came: a knife in my stomach, then a rush of such panic that I almost cried out, though not from pain. And along with the panic, what I can only call exhilaration: It was true then, this was what it was about, this sharp urgency was what my body had been heading toward.

  I put down my book and lay back on the bed, sweating, my heart racing. We had been instructed to get Miss Parnell or the assistant matron, Mrs. Glover, the minute we felt a twinge. Sometimes these things happen fast, girls, they said, and we are not equipped for emergencies. It always seemed to me that it was babies they weren’t equipped for: pregnancy, yes, but its logical product was outside their scope.

  For a while I did nothing. Perversely, I wanted to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to face Miss Parnell’s cold efficiency or Mrs. Glover with her saccharine concern. Long minutes went by, half an hour, an hour. From downstairs, I could hear the noise of the TV. The phone rang. Someone laughed; then a voice was raised in anger. Everything was unreal but the pains. I waited for each one impatiently, my hands trembling. After a few minutes: yes, again, the knife, exactly like what a shallow cut must feel like, I thought, the thrust of a blade—worse than a cramp, keener, more immediate. Then gone, completely, as if I’d dreamed it. I thought of Natasha, that foolish girl. I wondered what would happen to her in Book Two, and then the pain returned again, and again, at long intervals that I realized eventually were getting shorter. I tried to breathe deeply, as I had been taught in childbirth classes. I tried to keep track of the intervals. The pains were every five minutes, then three. I lost track. The knife went in deeper, and I screamed.

  Lucy, from next door, stuck her head in. “Wynn? What?”

  “Lucy! Help me! Get someone!” I was crying, ashamed of myself. In that instant, everything was gone—exhilaration, dignity, even the pain itself. All that was left was fear. I stood up, and the knife struck again, and my water broke.

  Miss Parnell called an ambulance. She had no sympathy for me. “I told you not to wait until the last minute,” she kept saying, tapping her foot angrily while I sat doubled over on the bench in the hallway, bundled into my coat, shivering with terror, the pains coming fast. When we finally heard the siren and I was hustled out, the girls drew back and didn’t say a word to me, as if I were contagious. In the narrow shelter of the ambulance it was better. “Don’t cry now,” the paramedic kept saying. He put his hand on my shoulder, smoothed back my hair. The siren wailed. “You’re going to be okay. We can deliver that baby right here if we need to, don’t worry about a thing.” I swallowed a Demerol, and things got hazy. They must have wheeled me directly into the delivery room—the night air was frigid, I do remember that, vaguely: the cold like distant music—and the next thing I knew was a headache and my mother.

  She was sitting by my bed in the recovery room, and tears were running down her cheeks. “It was a girl,” she said. She turned away and hid her face in a wad of tissues. “She looks exactly like you looked. Exactly.”

  • • •

  I wouldn’t have been at the Edna Quinlan Home if it hadn’t been for a party at Deirdre Coyle’s house. Her parties were famous. I had never been to one. Deirdre and I, to say the least, moved in different circles at Dunster High. But my friend Marietta was going, and she asked me to come along, and so I went. I can look back now and see how absurd it was, and yet somehow inevitable. All the clichés of adolescence in the sixties were in place: oversexed teenagers, pint bottles of cheap booze, the humid air of a July night, the irresistible beat of the music we loved. It was all so commonplace. It changed my life forever.

  But I suppose the story doesn’t really begin there. There were sixteen years before that party at Deirdre’s, before I became an inmate at Edna Quinlan, and when I look back on them now, it seems as if everything, every event, every noon and morning, every birthday and milestone and decision, led up to that July night and what came after it.

  I’ll start over. My name is Wynn Tynan. My father, James, was New England Yankee and Italian; my mother, Molly, was Irish and Welsh. Wynn was her maiden name. I was an only child, long awaited. Before me, there had been two miscarriages. As long as I knew her, even when she was an old woman, my mother still became quiet and depressed twice a year on their anniversaries. It was my father who explained this to me, on a morning when I came downstairs to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table in tears. I had never seen her cry before—my strong-willed, dignified mother. I’m not sure I was aware that grown-ups could cry. It shocked me, and I started to cry myself.

  My mother raised her head and said one word: “James.” My father scooped me up and took me out to the back steps. Jo-Jo the cat came with us and rubbed his head on my bare knees. My father was a reticent man, awkward with words, and a long moment passed before he could think what to say. I sat beside him, afraid to speak, my fingers in Jo-Jo’s fur, wondering if the world had come to an end.

  “You should have had two older brothers,” he said at last. I stared up at him. I was perhaps six. He put his arm around me. “But they died before they were born.”

  I had only recently begun to understand what it meant to die, and so the tears ran down my cheeks. But the grief I felt for these dead brothers was tinged with a kind of thrill: they died before they were born. It sounded like a riddle—How can you die before you’re born?—and I wondered if maybe the answer to the riddle was that they would somehow get another chance. I thought about having two older brothers, like Marietta did.

  “What are their names?”

  My father frowned down at me. His brown eyes were melancholy; his whole face drooped. I could see the long furrows in his cheeks, the three level lines across his forehead. “Were,” he said gently. “Kevin and Jeremy. Those were their names, Wynn.”

  There was a long silence. It was summer: Both my mother’s miscarriages had happened in hot weather. I can remember Jo-Jo’s burning fur, the exuberant pole beans climbing their wooden supports, my father’s large warm presence, and then my mother, bright-eyed, in the doorway behind us. “Who’d like some blueberry pancakes for breakfast?” And the quick, repr
ieved joy in my father’s face.

  • • •

  I grew up in the town of West Dunster, in southern Maine, about thirty miles from Portland. The town was tiny, an adjunct of the more bustling town of Dunster where my friends and I went to school. West Dunster lay tucked in a hollow between two low hills like a jewel held in a cupped palm. The hill to the west, rather grandly known as Burbank Mountain, was dense with fir trees. We could see it from our kitchen window: arrows of black rising up against the sky. The other hill was crowned with a house that everyone called the Castle—a vast stone pile belonging to the Erlings, of the Erling Paper Mills.

  We lived on Brewster Road at the very edge of the town, in a drafty farmhouse with a small barn out back where my father had his workshop. Everything was tidy and tended; my parents believed in beauty—they were nutty on the subject—and their concept of beauty demanded rigorous neatness. They were exacting about it, as if they were Shakers. The grass was always mown, the front walk swept, the leaves raked, the bushes pruned. The Maine weather was hard on perfectionists. Every few years, my father had to repaint the house and the barn: the barn a dusky red, the house a deep forest green trimmed in white. These were unvarying, but my mother changed the color of our front door from time to time: turquoise, crimson, screaming yellow—whatever took her fancy. (I remember a short-lived shocking pink that I particularly loved.) My little bedroom at the end of the hall was painted stark white, and decorated only with art posters my parents chose from museum catalogs; I grew up under the eyes of Van Gogh’s postman and Renoir’s jolly boating party. My father constructed my high-backed, high-sided bed from tiger maple, and on it was a crazy quilt my mother stitched one winter out of random scraps of my old blouses and overalls and pajamas: a history of my life that kept me warm at night. I made up my bed neatly every morning, first thing when I awoke: one of the inflexible rules my mother laid down, and something I did well into adulthood without even thinking about it.