Now he looked at my mother, and she said, “I’ll figure something out, James.”
My father’s face unknotted a little. He stood up and patted my back. “Right,” he said. “Okay, then. Don’t worry, Wynn. About anything. It’s not the end of the world.”
I didn’t want to contradict him. I nodded, trying to smile, and my mother and I went back to the house and left him to his work.
I could sense her wheels spinning already. My mother’s way of coping with disasters was always to take action and get things under control—maybe it was to keep herself too busy to think, but I believe also that in some way she almost enjoyed this kind of dilemma, she liked calling on her creativity, she saw it as a challenge. She spent two days making phone calls. We were having a heat wave, and I sat for long hours in the tub staring at the pattern on the shower curtain, using the toes on my left foot to let in more cold water, the toes on my right to open and close the drain. I looked down at my reasonably flat stomach, my small breasts. By Thanksgiving, I would be fat and ugly, with swollen ankles and morning sickness. At school, everyone would either hate me or pity me. I could imagine the gossip. Did you hear about Wynn Tynan? She got knocked up. That whore. What an idiot. How could anyone be so stupid? My own mother had said it.
Late in the afternoon of the second day she called me to come downstairs. She was sitting by the kitchen phone, frowning, drumming her fingernails on the table. When I came in, she looked up and said, “I’ve found a place you can go.”
“What do you mean?” I don’t think I’d realized until then that I would be going anywhere.
“It’s the Edna Quinlan Home for Girls,” she said, reading from a piece of paper. Her voice was neutral. “It’s in Boston. They have an opening. It’s nondenominational, which believe me is not that easy to find. It sounds like a decent place.” She smiled unhappily. “The woman I spoke to says they keep the girls nice and busy. I guess that’s good.”
“Um—I don’t really understand.” I felt my face getting hot. For a moment, I thought she was talking about a reform school. “You mean, this is a place where—?”
My mother’s voice was brisk. “You go there, you have the baby, and they find some nice people to adopt it.”
“Oh.” The baby. There would be a baby. Of course. I knew that. There would be a person, a human being, a little Kevin or Jeremy who would be adopted by nice people.
“There’s really no other choice,” my mother said.
She clicked her pen and made another note, then sat back and looked at me with satisfaction, her slight smile still in place. Suddenly I hated my mother’s efficiency, her competence. I was a problem, the baby was a problem, the problems were solved, that was that.
“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” I burst out. “Why are you treating me this way? Like I’m some kind of inconvenient object that has to be moved around!”
My mother never answered this kind of outburst. Her smile retreated; she sighed heavily. Then she stood up and went to the stove, put on a kettle of water, got out her old brown teapot and the tin of Darjeeling. I watched this ritual with resentment and disbelief. My life was over; my mother made tea. I wanted to smash the venerable brown pot, dump the tea on the floor.
“This is all so unreal,” I said. “I don’t want any tea! I want you to listen to me. I can’t do this!”
My mother came across the room and stood in front of me. Her eyes were cold. “What do you mean, you can’t do this?”
“I mean that I can’t! I don’t want to do it this way.”
“How do you want to do it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to think.”
“You’re not being reasonable.”
“I don’t want to be reasonable! I want you to listen to me!”
I couldn’t get up and leave the room. I would have had to push past her, and in that moment I hated my mother absolutely: If I touched her I knew I would strike out at her. I stared straight ahead, at the waistband of her old denim skirt, the buckle of the worn leather belt she’d had for as long as I could remember. Why couldn’t she wear a cheap, colorful polyester sundress once in a while? Why did we have to torture the lawn into submission every two weeks? Why couldn’t I cut my hair and wear it in an unbecoming honky Afro? Why did everything have to be so deliberate, so worthy, so fixed up until it was perfect? Where did that leave my flawed self and the poor baby growing in my uterus?
My mother said, “Wynn,” but I wouldn’t look at her. I stared at her stupid belt buckle. “You’re being ridiculous,” she said. “Of course I’ll listen to you. You know I always listen to you. What kind of mother do you think I am? But first you listen to me. You did something very, very stupid—you and that boy.” She said boy as if what she really meant was pervert or animal. “You created a problem—a huge, horrible, upsetting problem for all of us. That’s the situation. Let’s not sit around crying over it. When you have a problem, you solve it, Wynn. It may seem abrupt and coldhearted, but it’s the only way to deal with it.” Her voice became gentler. She said, “Honey, we have to be realistic. We can’t reverse what happened—though I know you would like to.”
No, I wouldn’t! I wanted to say. I fucked my brains out and I loved it and I’d do the same thing again! But of course that wasn’t even the truth. My mother was right, as she was always right: If I could have rolled the film back to Deirdre’s kitchen, I would have said, No, thanks, I’ll walk home, I’ll hitchhike, I’ll stay here and sleep in the bathtub, I’ll do anything, just please don’t let this happen.
“I’ve made these arrangements for you, Wynn—because it’s the best course of action for you,” my mother finished up. “I hope you understand that. It’s you I’m thinking of.” We were silent a moment, and then the kettle whistled and she went to make tea. From the stove, she said, “Now tell me what you wanted to say. Believe me, if you have another idea, I’m listening.”
She put in exactly three tablespoons of tea, filled the pot with boiling water, took the old knitted tea cozy from the drawer and covered the pot with it, set it down on the table in front of me, brought over two mugs, and poured milk into a pitcher. This familiar sequence of actions revolted me. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Wynn?”
“I don’t want to give the baby away.”
I heard my mother sit down across from me. I didn’t look at her, but I knew exactly what kind of frown she was frowning, what look of concern she was directing at my bent head, what complex of thoughts was raging through her brain. “Wynn—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “The eight reasons why there’s no other choice.”
But she surprised me. “It’s not a decision you have to make now,” she said. “I mean, it’s not as if you have to sign a surrender form to get into this place. I’m sure some girls keep their babies. You can leave it open for now, and see what you think when the time comes.”
I looked up at her. “I can?”
“Of course.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“For heaven’s sake, Wynn. I’m not a tyrant! It’s your decision.”
I sank to the floor before her and hugged her around the middle. Her belt buckle dug into my cheek. I didn’t care. She pressed her palms to my temples and gently massaged them. It’s what she used to do when I was little, and it always calmed me down. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “It is, sweetie. Wait and see. Everything will be fine.”
Her voice was calm and confident. Maybe it was true. And of course I would go away; it was the only thing to do. I leaned against my mother, the sweat trickling down my back. She kept rubbing my temples and after a minute she began to hum softly, an off-key “Eleanor Rigby.” I leaned against her and closed my eyes. I could have stayed there forever.
But under my jeans there was the baby: Its toes and ears and liver and lungs were creating themselves. I couldn’t feel it happening, but I was intensely conscious of it. So, apparently, was my mot
her. “Time’s a-wasting,” she said. She pushed me away, patted my shoulder, and reached for the teapot. “We need to talk about what to do next.”
What we did next, two days later, was meet with Mark’s parents up at the Castle. Mark wasn’t present; my parents and I were ushered in by a woman I assumed was Mrs. Erling but who turned out to be a servant of some kind. She showed us into a living room as big as our barn and frigidly air-conditioned. A pitcher of iced tea sweated on a tray, but no one touched it. I sat alone on a stiff brocade sofa, shivering. The parents sat on chairs that flanked the fireplace. There was an idyllic oil painting of two golden-haired toddlers over the mantel; about halfway through our visit I realized they must be Mark and his brother.
The Erlings were remote but cooperative—obviously relieved that I wasn’t making any embarrassing claims on their son. When my name came up, they glanced vaguely in my direction; they never once met my eyes. Mrs. Erling was willowy and glamorous, with short white-blond hair and a black sheath dress. Mr. Erling wore a seersucker suit and a tie. He asked my father to spell Quinlan, and wrote down the name and address of the home in a pigskin notebook. “It will probably be best just to have the bills sent to my accountant,” he said, as if to himself, and made a note. “I’ll take care of that.”
My father’s face turned red. “That’s not necessary.”
“To us it is,” Mr. Erling said shortly.
My father was stubborn. “I would like to share the expenses.”
Mr. Erling produced a tight smile, showing perfect teeth like Mark’s. “We’d prefer to do it this way.” My mother gave my father a look, and he subsided.
“Thank you,” I said when we left to no one in particular, and no one answered. The fathers shook hands. The mothers got teary and looked as if they thought they should embrace, but didn’t. I hated Mark for getting out of it.
In the car, my mother said, “Did you get the impression that this isn’t the first time one of their boys has gotten into trouble?”
Very few people knew about my predicament. My parents didn’t tell Anna Rosa; somehow they managed to avoid going to New York for Christmas. My teachers had to be in on it and agreed to send me assignments so I could keep up with my class. Miss Morgan, my English teacher, gave me War and Peace to read while I was away; she said it would take my mind off things. Mrs. Diamond, my art teacher, hugged me and said, “Artists are born to suffer, Wynn. It’s the way of the world.”
And I told Marietta. By the time I did, she was well over her crush on Spencer and was absorbed in a boy named Keith Emery who was new at our school that fall and who had shoulder-length hair and a thin beard. She was so happy that I kept putting off telling her, and when I did she wept and said, “That rotten scum rich kid, that son of a bitch.”
“It was my fault as much as his,” I pointed out.
She turned on me fiercely. “It’s never the girl’s fault as much as the boy’s!” Marietta was discovering the women’s movement. “He stuck it in you—right? And he’s not going to have to be in labor for long horrible hours and hours.”
I preferred not to think about being in labor. I did my best not to think at all, and I took care not to look at my naked self in the mirror—my rounding belly and alarming breasts. Clothed, I didn’t look particularly pregnant. I was a tall, chunky girl, and I hid things successfully under the big sweaters and full skirts that we all wore. Marietta advised me to deflect attention from my thickening waist by wearing plenty of beads and earrings and letting my hair out of its braid to fly around my head. I don’t know if any of this worked or not. I avoided people as much as possible: I resigned from Dead Duck and stopped going to parties. Neil Hauser kept asking me out, and I finally told him I had a boyfriend who was away at college. Princeton, I said. Neil seemed impressed. I threw myself into my schoolwork. When I left for Boston just after Christmas, five and a half months pregnant, my grades were better than they had been in my entire life.
It was Marietta who concocted my story. A rich great-aunt of mine needed a companion while she recovered from a serious operation and had asked my parents if I could come and stay with her. It was pretty lame, and I wasn’t sure how many people it fooled, but my parents seized upon it with relief, and Marietta fabricated letters I wrote from Aunt Sarah’s townhouse on Beacon Hill and quoted from them to the kids at school. Aunt Sarah was rather dotty, she wandered around Boston singing to herself, wearing sandals and ragged blue jeans with her mink, but she had taken a fancy to me, she was sure to leave me everything in her will.
Mark Erling wrote me one letter at the Edna Quinlan Home for Girls just after New Year’s, telling me that if I needed or wanted anything, anything at all, please to let him know, and he would get it for me, no matter what it was. I was surprised at Mark’s unexpected torment—his tears on the phone, his guilt—and I tried to imagine what expiatory quest I could send him off on, what outrageous item I could ask him for: an original Picasso? a date with John Lennon? The last sentence of his letter was, “Please forgive me for this, Wynn.” I ripped it up and didn’t reply. Then he sent me an irritatingly silly Valentine’s Day card with a note: “Please let me know what happens.” I didn’t.
At first, my parents drove down to Boston to visit me every week. My father was almost ludicrously distressed at seeing me pregnant. His eyes burned into mine when we talked, and I realized it was so that he wouldn’t have to look at my stomach. My mother tried so hard to be sympathetic but cheerful that she always left with a headache. Finally I told them they didn’t have to come, a weekly phone call would be just as good. My father sent me books and art supplies and wrote me letters that were meant to be light and funny. My mother kept coming anyway, every Saturday. She always took me out for lunch. She would order coffee and a bagel for herself, and a large, wholesome meal for me: a glass of milk, a grilled cheese sandwich, a green salad, oatmeal cookies—pretty much what I would have had back at Edna Quinlan. We would sit in the restaurant while she talked and talked, about anything, everything, Nixon’s inauguration, the new Beatles album, a quilt she was making, the cats, an antiwar rally at Dunster High, Marietta’s father’s gall bladder operation.
I didn’t have much to say myself, so I was grateful for her flow of conversation, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was a diversionary tactic, as if she knew that the one thing I did want to say was exactly what she didn’t want to hear.
My mother was always upbeat, but at the first signs of spring, she became aggressively so. On a sunny March Saturday, we walked slowly back to Beacon Street in the chilly air. She hugged me hard, my monstrous stomach against her flat one. Her car was parked at the curb, and she got into it and grinned at me through the window. “It won’t be long now!” she trilled, as if I were having a show of my paintings instead of giving birth.
After she drove off, I went inside and placed a collect call to my father. He accepted the charges, then asked, “What’s up, darlin’?” in the hearty new voice he used now for talking to me. “Is your mother still there?”
“She just left, Dad. That’s why I called. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and after a pause, “Well. What about, then, Wynn?”
“I want you to help me.”
“Help you? Help you what?”
The phone at the Edna Quinlan Home was in a tiny closet on the first floor under the stairs. The closet didn’t have a door; it obviously had at one time, you could see where the hinges had been removed, but secrets weren’t encouraged at Edna Quinlan—clandestine calls to inconvenient boyfriends, demoralizing weeping sessions with parents or friends. I kept my voice low.
“I want you to help me convince Mom that I shouldn’t give up the baby for adoption.”
“Oh, Wynn, honey—”
My father’s voice was weary, as if he’d heard this too many times already, and I knew my mother had told him how I felt, they had discussed it, they had agreed not to encourage me. I went on quickly. “Just listen to me, Daddy, pl
ease. I don’t want to give it away. I don’t! It doesn’t seem right!” I heard my voice getting louder, and I knew it must be carrying out to the living room where a crowd of girls was playing some game, even down to the kitchen where the evening meal was being prepared. I expected any minute to be interrupted by one of the matrons or the social worker, so I calmed down and went on, as softly as I could. “Daddy, I can’t talk about this with Mom, I don’t know why, I just know she doesn’t want to hear it, and I don’t understand that, she was always so upset about the two babies that she lost, you know how she cries every year, it meant so much to her, why can’t she see that this means something to me? She said I could make my own decision, but I know what she wants me to do, we never talk about it, I know she wouldn’t listen to me.”
I stopped, sensing the approach of a wave of hysteria that would have felt so good I could hardly keep from giving in to it, and yet I sensed that if anything could convince my father it was quiet rational argument. I had rehearsed this conversation for days; bringing up my mother’s miscarriages had been, I thought, an inspired move.
“Please talk to her, Daddy,” I said. “Please try to convince her. She’ll listen to you.”
My father said, gently, “Wynn.”
I pressed my hand to my hot forehead, I switched the phone to my other ear, I tried to stay calm. “What?”
Five Questions Page 4
