Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  She stared at me a moment—I suppose I stared back—and then she began, quickly, to talk and make me welcome, fussing over my wet coat, my cold feet. We exclaimed about the weather, both of us talking too fast. “Wouldn’t you know?” she said. “We haven’t had snow in weeks, and today of all days it has to do this.” Then, impulsively, she hugged me and said, “Well, I sure never expected to be having dinner with my daughter’s mother. Isn’t it the craziest thing?”

  The house was warm; a fire burned in the vast fireplace. The place hadn’t changed much in the twenty-eight years since I’d been there. In the huge, long living room, I recognized the sofa I had sat on in such misery, the table where the pitcher of iced tea had sweated untouched. I looked for the painting of Mark and Jeff over the fireplace; it had been replaced with a seascape. I stood before the fire and stared stupidly at sailboats on blue water until Mark said, “Wynn? This is Kathleen.” And there, coming toward me across the room, was the young woman who was my daughter.

  My first thought was that she didn’t look like me. In person, she managed to look a lot like my mother without resembling me much at all, except for her hair. She was as tall as I, but much more slender than I ever was. She had Mark’s green eyes and high cheekbones, my mother’s fine features, very pale skin that was all her own. But I knew immediately that she was my flesh and blood.

  We stared at each other, and then we embraced. For a while it was all a blur, a crazy, wonderful movie that whipped by me—too much to absorb. I was introduced to Nick, who looked something like Mark—tall and sandy haired. Annie hovered, smiling anxiously. The Erlings’ fat calico cat rubbed against our legs. Mark brought in a pot of coffee, and finally we all took a mug of it and sat down in chairs around the fire. Annie passed a tray of cookies. We wiped our eyes. There was an awkward silence. Then Mark said, “Well, here we are—one big happy family.” It wasn’t particularly funny, but it made us laugh, and then it was suddenly almost ordinary—just an unorthodox family reunion.

  I sat beside my daughter. The others drank their coffee and drifted away—Nick to shovel snow, Annie to the kitchen, Mark to make some phone calls—and Kathleen and I talked.

  “I used to wonder about you.” She had a soft voice, a hint of a Maine twang like Mark’s, and she sat with her hands folded demurely in her lap. “I used to wonder who you had become. What you were doing. Sometimes I wished so much that I could just call you up on the phone. I wanted to know what you looked like, and how you were like me, and how you were different. I used to daydream about finding out where you were, and following you, spying on you. I never understood those feelings, because I loved my parents. I didn’t ask about you, and I tried not to think about you because it seemed disloyal to Mom. But I couldn’t help it sometimes.”

  She dropped her gaze to her hands. On the left one was a modest engagement ring. She wore a light blue sweater, pale stockings, delicate shoes. Her hair was cut short, the way my mother used to wear hers. I stared at her: This was that baby, this sweet, fragile girl. My heart overflowed.

  “Didn’t you ever just plain—hate me?” I had to get it over with; it was a question I needed to ask. I hadn’t given her up to die, but I’d given her up nonetheless—deliberately, blindly, thrown away the opportunity to be this girl’s mother. “For not keeping you?”

  “You were sixteen years old,” she said, with a little smile. “When I was sixteen myself, I thought about you. When I was the age you were when you had me. I tried to figure out what I would do if that happened to me. I mean, if I were pregnant and not married.”

  “And—?”

  She shrugged. “What else could you have done?” she said. “Especially in those days.”

  I thought of all those depressed girls with their swollen bellies. Suzanne and her twins. “It was so hard to know. It wasn’t what I wanted. I let myself think it was for the best.”

  She touched my hand. “Don’t feel guilty. You made the only smart decision.” She paused, then said, “But yeah, I did hate you sometimes. It wasn’t logical, but sometimes I wanted to talk to you just so I could tell you how much I hated what you had done. One Halloween I had this terrific witch costume—big pointy hat, black cloak, and a fantastic scraggly wig made out of yarn—and I looked at myself in the mirror and saw this scary old crone and, all of a sudden, I really felt like a witch, and I cast a spell on you.”

  “What kind of a spell?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  I tried to laugh. “Sort of.”

  She took a deep breath. “I hoped you would die,” she said. “I hoped you would boil in oil. I hoped toads would eat you. I stood looking at myself, saying a lot of mumbo-jumbo imagining those things and terrifying myself.” She grinned suddenly. “God, I was an awful brat.”

  “You sound just like me.”

  Her eyes were lit with tenderness. I could see that she was memorizing my face as I was hers, trying to find herself there. Then, hesitantly, she said, “Wynn?” We looked at each other, a little startled. “Should I call you Wynn?” she asked. “Or what?”

  “Wynn will do fine.”

  “Wynn.” She smiled and went on. “Did you ever wonder about me? Where I was, or—” She spread her hands helplessly. “Did you ever think about me at all?”

  “Oh, Kathleen,” and my voice wavered. “I don’t know how to say this. I don’t know how to tell this story. I thought I did, but I don’t.” I looked at the fire, the cat asleep before it, the seascape over the mantel, the plate of cookies. It all seemed blessed and beautiful, lit with radiance. The years that had passed since I last sat here no longer seemed real. Nothing made sense but this warm living room, this house and the people in it, this newfound daughter who called me by my name.

  Kathleen’s gentle voice said, “What? Tell me.”

  “I can’t. It’s all so—” I had to stop, start again. With this miraculous girl beside me, my long sad story was absurd. “I’ll tell you someday, but I can’t now.”

  “There’s a lot to tell?”

  I smiled at her. “Yes. There’s a lot to tell. But take my word for it—I thought about you. It’s just that now—here—seeing you like this—it all seems irrelevant.”

  “I don’t want to press you,” she said. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “I will.” I looked at her through a film of tears, and then I said, “You know, Kathleen—you look so much like my mother it almost breaks my heart.”

  “It makes me happy to know that—that I look like my mother’s mother.”

  Kathleen smiled, too, and now for the first time I saw a bit of myself in her face—briefly, the way a headlight from a passing car illuminates an object in a dark room. I thought: I am not alone. I couldn’t help remembering my mother’s letter, the way it broke off. I only wish. . . That unfinished sentence had haunted me for years. Had she ever wished for something like this, I wondered—for the story to end not in anguish and loss but in this shocking quiet wonder. In this bright young face that was, somehow, my mother’s face, too. I thought of another sentence in that letter, the one that had infuriated me: I hope someday you’ll forgive me, maybe when you have a daughter of your own. And here she was. And what I felt for her overpowered me—even now, when I had just met her, before I knew her. It gave me an inkling of what my mother meant: that a loved child can make a parent irrational, crazy—that love not only doesn’t guarantee wisdom, sometimes it can subvert it completely.

  Impulsively, Kathleen put out her hand and touched my hair. “We have the same hair,” she said, and began to laugh. “Oh my God, Wynn. You’re my mother. You’re really my mother.”

  • • •

  Why did I return? This is why I returned, Kathleen. To have my life restored to me. To roll back the years and be given this gift: the chance to start over. You returned from the dead, Kathleen. And, God knows, so did I.

  • • •

  The snow continued to fall, the fire burned in the grate, and we spent the afternoon
together, my daughter and I. She wanted to know about my childhood, my life, my paintings. She was especially curious about her grandparents; all she knew was that my father made toys, and they had lived in the little house on Brewster Road. Telling her about my mother and my father, about Anna Rosa, about my childhood there in West Dunster, was an unexpected pleasure: Who else could I ever say these things to? The years disappeared, and with them the anger I’d been hoarding. My childhood returned, redeemed somehow: It hadn’t been a childhood that led up to an act of careless irresponsibility with horrifying consequences. This girl, this lovely Kathleen, was part of those years. She was what they had produced. What could I do with my old resentments? They had no place in this new world.

  Kathleen had Mark’s easy gregariousness; she liked to talk. She told me about Nick, who wrote press releases for an environmental group in Portland, and about her work—she had a degree in journalism, and covered local politics for the Portland newspaper, a job she loved. Just looking at her, studying her face while she talked, filled me with joy. I kept discovering new things, like a certain expression in her eyes, halfway between a smile and a frown, that reminded me of my father. I watched her smooth her skirt over her knees, straighten her ring so that the diamond winked in the light. I wondered if she had also inherited my mother’s passion for order. And I wondered what she ate for breakfast, what books she read, what made her laugh. I thought: Someday I will know all this. Someday I’ll take it all for granted. I’ll buy her Christmas presents, I’ll think: Kathleen will like this, Kathleen loves this color.

  After a while, she dug out photograph albums full of pictures of herself growing up, and her life unrolled like the coming attractions of a movie I would never see: Kathleen on Annie’s lap, being carried piggyback by Mark, blowing out birthday candles. Kathleen on roller skates, on her bike, mugging with her girlfriends, posing with someone’s dog. There was a picture of her in the evil witch costume. And with Reggie the cat when he was a kitten. Kathleen dressed as a flapper for a school play, then awkwardly regal in deep blue at some dance with a boy named Eric. Kathleen in Georgia visiting her Aunt Merle and in Palm Beach with Mark’s elderly, still beautiful mother: Gramby, she called her. Kathleen’s college graduation, the party out in the garden. Kathleen a bridesmaid in some cousin’s wedding. Kathleen and Nick in hiking clothes. And here were the two of them again on Thanksgiving with Annie and Mark at Mark’s brother Jeff’s house in New Hampshire, there were Jeff and his wife, Sally, and their daughter Tess, and their son, Damon, and Damon’s girlfriend Maureen, and Nick’s brother Kyle, and Boomer the dog. . . .

  The photographs bowled me over: a record of the large, complicated world my daughter had inhabited during the years I was mourning her. I examined that world as avidly as I used to pore over the clippings about Molly McCormick. Kathleen explained the photos to me, patiently reeling off names and dates and circumstances, and I listened to the tale of each cousin, each skinned knee, each dog and cat and hamster as if the information would save my life. You’re part of our family, Mark had said. These words touched me more than perhaps anything. I had had no family for so long. There had just been Alec. My parents had been dead for years, and so had his. His sister lived in Michigan; we never saw her. We hadn’t even had a pet, because of the rugs. And here I was with people who had been looking for me, who wanted me to be a part of their lives. I tried to imagine my own face in these photographs, the extra mother at the Thanksgiving feast, at the wedding to come. Part of the family. Whatever that would mean.

  Nick came in for a minute, scattering snow, his cheeks bright red, then disappeared again to watch a football game. Mark entered from time to time with a weather bulletin: The roads were bad, the plows couldn’t keep up with it. And how were we doing? Did we need anything? Annie brought fresh coffee and little sandwiches, patting my shoulder in passing, stooping to kiss Kathleen lightly on the forehead. I was puzzled by Annie and the warm casualness with which she seemed to accept my presence. I tried to imagine how she must feel, and could only conclude that she was nothing like me. I doubted I would consider the intrusion of my daughter’s mother such an uncomplicated pleasure. But then I was certainly no role model for motherhood.

  The five of us had a late dinner in the dining room: beef stew, a salad, the table set with exquisite china and crystal that looked like it dated back to Mark’s parents’ time, and another fire roaring in another huge fireplace. Mark sat at the head of the table, Annie on his right, me on his left—his two consorts, I thought, though I was the only one who seemed to find the situation strange. The Erlings’ calm acceptance of what had happened continued to astonish me, but it seemed genuine. When Mark opened champagne, poured it, and raised his glass to say, “Welcome, Wynn, from all of us—from the heart,” everyone clinked glasses, and I burst into tears. Kathleen passed me a tissue, and Nick made a joke about the excessive number of mothers-in-law he was facing. Annie laughed and said we’d have to figure out a way to share the work of interfering, she was glad it wouldn’t be a full-time job.

  There was more joking, and we put away a lot of champagne. It was not very good champagne: I imagined Alec taking a few sips, then, with exquisite politeness, declining any more. But I drank it willingly enough, and happily got slightly drunk. The conversation at dinner was about football, a Portland politician’s mishandling of campaign funds, a fluffy sweater of Nick’s that had become a family joke. After my third glass of champagne, I began to feel I had died and been reborn as a member of the Erling clan, and I entered into a long conversation with Mark and Annie about local zoning and development.

  By the time we had finished coffee and dessert—apple crisp, an old family recipe from Gramby’s cook—it was obvious that I would have to stay the night, the weather was much too foul to consider driving back to my motel.

  They put me in a tidy guest bedroom with its own bath, a big four-poster bed, a down comforter. It was the kind of house that always contained spare toothbrushes, and Annie lent me a flannel nightgown. I didn’t expect to sleep, but once I got into bed exhaustion took me over. For years I had done my best to keep my feelings at bay. Now I barely had time to get used to one jolt before another one came along. I had just enough energy left to be amused at myself, and then I fell deeply asleep to the sound of the snow and the wind.

  I awoke early, in the middle of a confused dream that took place on the steps of my London row house and involved Alec and the diamond bracelet I found in his drawer. My watch said 5:15. I listened to the absolute stillness. The storm was over. The house was very warm. I didn’t want to return to my dreams, and I lay there for a long time, wide awake, replaying the events of the day before, until in the gap between the curtains I could see the beginning of a cold dawn.

  Then I got up, pulled my sweater over my nightgown, and went downstairs to the living room. A pale morning light illuminated it, and seeing that room again I realized it was a completely different place than it had been in Mark’s parents’ day. The proportions were the same, and some of the furniture, but Mark and Annie had added comfort and life, an indefinable aura of contentment. I was thankful that Kathleen had grown up here, that life had been so good to her.

  I had a sudden need to see her face. The photograph albums were where we had left them, and I opened one at random. There she was, sitting demurely on a wicker porch chair. Her hair was in braids, her smile was uncertain.

  I heard a noise behind me: Annie. She wore a plaid bathrobe and furry red slippers. “That was taken shortly before Mark and I were married,” she said. “That was one confused child. All of a sudden her father comes out of the woodwork. Happy, but definitely confused.” She smiled. “Have you been awake long?”

  “A couple of hours. Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me either. I’m going to make coffee. Want a cup?”

  We went into the kitchen, and I took a seat at the table. Out the window, the tentative morning brightness showed a terrace banked with snow, and beyond it a long stretch
of garden with snow-covered trellises and a half-buried gazebo. Far in the distance, over the valley that was West Dunster, Burbank Mountain loomed black in the cold light. Neither of us spoke while Annie ground beans and made coffee. I watched her: a naturally small, wiry woman who was thickening through the middle as she aged. It was easy to see her as a nurse, a reassuring presence, cheerful no matter how devastating the diagnosis.

  She set a mug in front of me—yellow with a smiley face on it—and sat down across the table with a sigh. “So.”

  “The sleepless mothers.” The coffee was bitter and scalding, but I was still slightly fuzzy from the champagne, and it tasted wonderful. I looked around me, feeling dazed and happy, taking in the kitchen’s homely details as if I were a visitor in some exotic country: baskets on a shelf, a pile of cookbooks, a bowl on the floor that said CAT. “It’s nice here,” I said, inadequately.

  “You’re doing incredibly well,” Annie said. “For a woman who’s just had her life turned upside down.”

  “Or right-side up.” I took another sip. “I haven’t thanked you yet, Annie, so I want to do it now.”

  “Thanked me? What on earth for?”

  “For letting me into your life like this.”

  “Oh, that. Nonsense. This has been wonderful for us.”

  The window became suddenly lighter, and we both looked out. The low sun had reached around the garage and lit the terrace. Below us, the mist was clearing from the rooftops of West Dunster. The snow sparkled where the light reached it, and the sky beyond Burbank Mountain was blue streaked with rose. It would be a beautiful day. Then Annie said, “Well, maybe I should revise that. I do want to be honest.”

  My stomach turned over. I had no idea what to expect. “Please,” I said, and it was probably hard to tell from my tone if the word meant polite acquiescence or was a plea for mercy. I had a sudden urge to go back to bed and start over.