Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  He didn’t tell Lorna this story about the crack visitors.

  21

  Sometimes the handwriting of Providence is hard to read.

  At her lunch with Lorna, Donna didn’t mention her plan to sell the house she had so providentially been given. Obtuse as she could sometimes be, even she could see the Mott family, especially Amy, was going to take it amiss, as a form of ingratitude. Maybe affronting them would be worth it if she could realize a sizable profit; as it was, after paying Amy back, she’d only come out with the down payment minus capital gains for her future, which they would be sure to point out. If she could sell at all. The bottom was falling out of the housing market; everyone could see that.

  Donna knew that Lorna knew that Hams believed Curt was actually in touch with her, Donna, and was hiding because of some financial crime, but she put this belief down to their ancient sibling rivalry. He hadn’t been in touch. But then, not too long after her lunch with Lorna, Donna’s happiness and sense of good fortune were rudely blighted by an actual letter from Curt. To date there had only been a few postcards, but here was an envelope. She was hoping for a return address so she could let him know about their good fortune and Amy’s generosity, and tore it open eagerly. It was handwritten in Curt’s correct, rather prim script but seemed a bit incoherent:

  Darling Donna,

  All is going well, but I’m writing to say I’m going to make my life here. It’s nothing to do with you, I was perfectly happy in San Francisco, you shouldn’t blame yourself. There are a lot of opportunities here.

  The twins are so young, they won’t miss me, I’m thankful about that. You can have the house, that should cover what you need. I thank God for your MBA, you’ll know what you’re doing.

  Of course you’ll say it was my accident that brought on this need for a life change, and that would be right. There’s nothing like looking into the face of God.

  Just as a precaution, it’s better for you if you don’t have my address, and anyhow I’m on the move. I’ll figure out some way to handle legal things that might come up.

  Love,

  Curt

  Donna read this letter with bafflement, reread it, her heart congealing with fear as she came to understand it. He seemed to be saying he wasn’t coming home. That he was cutting her loose with only her MBA to face the future without him. Or was that it? “You can have the house.” That much was clear, though it didn’t escape her that Curt didn’t yet know about the paid-off mortgage. He might not realize he was leaving her with a multimillion-dollar asset. When he did, he’d be sure to renege on his generous offer.

  Why was she sure he was leaving her? He didn’t actually say so. Her legs felt weak and trembling, and she had to sit down. She had to think what to do. He didn’t say don’t come to Thailand. During his coma, she had so often reviewed what she would do if Curt were to die, but all her ideas deserted her now.

  When her blood began to run again, she slid into the first of the stages she’d read about: denial, quickly dispatched with, since the words were before her. But still, she might not be reading him right. He might mean he wasn’t coming home yet.

  Anger. Rage, more like. The words of a letter she’d write to Curt formed and re-formed in her mind, but it was time to pick up the twins from their nursery school; she banged the fender backing out of the garage and didn’t bother to get out to review whether there were scratches or dents on his precious Beamer.

  22

  Some blithe spirits have perfected the art of laying their worries on you.

  Because Gilda did not seem very interested in her own plight, Julie took on for them both the inner turmoil, the worry, the kaleidoscope of possible outcomes, measures for Gilda to take, and personal actions she, Julia Willover, ought to take. Julie knew she herself might, in the same fix at the same age, have been as vacuous and drifting as Gilda was.

  They would start by repeating the pregnancy test in case Gilda had read it wrong. On the next Saturday, she steered Gilda into a Walgreens and they bought the cheapest one, one that claimed it could tell as early as six days after the event. She went with Gilda to the ladies’ room in Macy’s and read the directions herself, coaching Gilda through the door of the toilet stall. The enclosure said, “Because this test detects low levels of hCG, it is possible that this test may give positive results even if you are not pregnant. If you test positive, but think you may not be pregnant, you should check with your doctor.”

  “Did you ever hear that your diabetes medicine could, like, give a false positive on something like this?”

  Gilda laughed. “Where would I hear that? We don’t discuss pregnancy at Saint Waltraud’s.

  “Okay, I’ve peed on the stick,” she said in a minute. She came out of the stall with her warm paper cup.

  Julie studied the instructions, written in barely comprehensible English translated from an unknown tongue: “It is need to remove the hCG test strips from the conserved pouch and dip the strip in the urine through the arrow point to the urine. It is very important that do not let the urine level to go above the maximum line; otherwise the test will not do properly.”

  “Okay, I get that. Dip the strip in. This must have been written in Bangalore.”

  “People speak English in Bangalore,” Gilda said.

  “ ‘The hCG test strip is absorbed into a urine sample, capillary act carries the sample to transfer along the covering. When hCG in the taster makes the Test Zone area of the covering, it will appear a colored line. But not appear of this colored line recommend a negative result.’

  “Now we wait, I guess,” Julie went on. “I’m not sure what this is saying.”

  “I did all this,” Gilda said. She dipped the paper strip into her cup and watched the capillary action. Soon it turned a vigorous pink.

  “See?” said Gilda.

  “Okay,” said Julie, chilled at the horrid, emphatic dawning color and its significance. She felt she was reacting for the two of them, since Gilda seemed so unaffected. Once you got used to her pallor, she was beautiful, like the statues of saints in dim churches. Julie wondered about the mechanics behind Gilda’s description of goo mostly on her thigh. Could sperm crawl as well as swim? Could that have been what happened to the Virgin Mary?

  “I have to go. Carla should be here,” Gilda said. “She’s picking me up in front of Macy’s.”

  Over the next few days, Gilda’s plight continued to weigh on Julie, along with a sense of duty, which she tried to define: What was her duty here? She thought of the cute little baby Gilda could have with the handsome young man, she thought of Gilda’s age and cluelessness, she thought of the reputed wealth of Gilda’s parents—Julie’s own grandfather—and of how easily Gilda could disappear to some comfortable Caribbean island for a few months on account of her health; no one would question it. Then Grandpa Ran and his wife could adopt the baby. She began to have a sense of her duty, and once she became convinced of the wisdom of this adoption plan, she became fearful that something would go wrong, Gilda would do the wrong thing, or miscarry. The girl had still not told her parents.

  * * *

  —

  The handsome young man, Ian Aymes, for his part, had told his mother. Ursula’s reaction was not at all what he expected. Far from fainting with dismay, she sighed a rather insincere sigh and said she supposed such things happened. Young people nowadays. Gilda was a pretty child, though it was wrong of him to forget her age. Of course she did look older, she thought in his defense. How were Amy and Ran reacting? Ian was astonished at her calm.

  “She hasn’t told them. She’s pretty scared. We thought she could go, you know, to the doctor, without them having to know, but I would need some money.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Ursula mused and seemed to drop the subject, leaving Ian unsure what he ought to do or what she thought. He chalked it up to her being stunned.
But he still needed money.

  “I think my mother will help,” he assured Gilda on the telephone, but he really had no reason to think so.

  Ursula, for her part, was by no means appalled to think of having a biological connection, a family connection, to Amy Hawkins and her millions, or billions; no one knew how much, Silicon Valley numbers were ridiculous, perhaps unaffected by the ongoing grimness of whatever was happening to the American economy, disaster all around them, especially the real-estate market.

  How unlucky that Gilda was only fifteen and probably would not be allowed to have a baby. The more Ursula thought about it, the more proprietary she began to feel about her incipient grandchild in the womb of the teenaged heiress. She and Ran and Amy needed to have a serious talk. Questions of posterity and sentimental visions of adorable babies in bassinets and recollections of Ian when a baby of greeting-card beauty stirred her heart to something almost akin to pain, to think of the difficulties ahead, the confusion of the paths that beckoned.

  Ian, meantime, was taking a makeup class in Western civilization at the junior college in Mountain View, as was needed for the Thinking Matters core curriculum requirement at Stanford. He kept his mind on that, and was also involved in intramural soccer, which took up a lot of time. When he was not enjoying violent athletic activity, thoughts tormented him, about Gilda’s age and about the possibility of her parents prosecuting him. Whenever he and Gilda spoke, he apologized, again and again, sincerely.

  * * *

  —

  Gilda had read on the web that diabetic pregnancy had more complications and produced more congenital anomalies than normal, and you had to achieve better glycemic control, and that she should have gone to a diabetic control clinic before conceiving. There were personal testimonies: “My doctor told me to check my blood glucose every two hours, make sure I bolused 15 minutes before a meal, and I should exercise at least 30 minutes a day. I also tried to shoot for a premeal blood-sugar number of 60–90 mg/dL and 120 mg/dL two hours after eating.”

  Another diabetic woman had written: “I checked my blood sugars as the doctor instructed, every hour, and at 2 hours I would correct if I was above a 90 mg/dL blood sugar.” Reading further, she found: “I also sent my blood-sugar log to my endocrinologist every Friday and, shortly after emailing, my doctor would call with new basal rates and carbohydrate ratios. The rates varied throughout the entire pregnancy. If I didn’t send my logs on time, I got a phone call from her. Now if they only did that all of the time, I would never have a high A1C!” Gilda understood the arcane language of diabetes control better even than her parents.

  Alone in her room, scaring herself with reading these things—“Check your blood sugar every hour!”—she was coming around to the idea she was going to have to tell her parents so her baby would turn out okay. She was pretty sure they would want the baby. She might need special doctors. She might have to check her sugar every hour!

  Otherwise, in general, she figured out from all this, a diabetic person like her shouldn’t have a baby, maybe she could never have one, pregnancy would mess her up or kill her. She didn’t care that much; it was only one of the bad things she was always finding out about her illness, how she might lose her toes someday, or her sight, things talked about online all the time, horrors of mutilation and gangrene, which never had been mentioned by her doctors or parents.

  23

  Moral decisions are more comfortably shared than brooded over alone.

  Julie had told her mother Peggy all about the gala, with Grandpa Ran’s silvery fifteen-year-old maiden daughter (Peggy’s own half sister!) in the ugly lace dress, and about the other dresses she had seen, and the flowers, and the radiance of Amy Hawkins Mott in black-and-rose Givenchy, or so it had been described in the Chronicle the next day. Peggy in turn said nothing about the gala to her mother Lorna, but she wondered if Lorna was reading the paper. Peggy had some residual scruple about being too friendly with Amy and Ran when Lorna was so bravely hard up, but she did talk to her father once a month or so.

  Now, Julie decided to also tell Peggy about Gilda’s catastrophe and get her advice about what she, Julie, ought to do to help Gilda or intervene or tell Grandpa Ran or what. Maybe some sisterly instinct might guide them. Gilda was her mother’s half sister after all—weird as the chronology was.

  She telephoned Peggy. They talked a little about this and that—they were friendly but not as close as some mothers and daughters; Julie didn’t have much sense of what her mother did all day and vice versa. The subject they most had in common was Julie’s own fate—her tuition, her student loans, her whereabouts, her weight, at least when Julie had been pudgy, at age fourteen, and the Circle of Faith, which Julie had tried to interest Peggy in. Now they talked of Julie’s crusade for going to Greece, then eventually Julie brought up the subject of Gilda.

  “It’s hard to imagine, but your sister Gilda is in trouble.”

  “You mean ‘in trouble’?” Peggy asked. “You mean, shoplifting or something like that? Pregnant?” She thought she was being funny.

  “Pregnant, yes. She made it sound like a freak thing. A boy her family knows. She’s afraid to tell Grandpa and Amy.” She described the situation. Peggy expressed her astonishment. They laughed a bit, both feeling guilty for laughing at someone’s plight.

  “Are you telling me this so I’ll tell Dad?” Peggy finally asked. “I don’t even know Gilda—hardly know her. I saw her when she was about five. I have dinner with my father once in a while, but I’ve never even been to their house. Is she very upset?”

  “Not as upset as you’d think. She’s a strange kid, kind of spacey, nice and polite. She did tell me, though, so she seems to want some moral support.”

  “Well, sure.” Peggy sympathized with any girl in that predicament. “I always wondered what we would do if anything like that happened to you.”

  Julie sniffed at the idea. Something like that would not happen to her; she was more competent than that. But she hadn’t been sexually active at fifteen, either.

  “Dad is a doctor, after all, he’ll deal with it,” Peggy said. “She has to tell him, though. Has she?”

  Julie did not think so. She told Peggy some of her imaginary baroque, inventive solutions involving trips to the Bahamas or Greece, or maybe a semester in France working on French language skills; they could make up a history for an unexplained baby—an orphaned refugee; a pregnant housekeeper mown down in a mall incident, followed by emergency C-section, adoption by the Motts…None of these ideas would be of any use if the baby should turn out to be an albino freak like Gilda, but probably it wouldn’t; her coloring was just a fluke. When Peggy just laughed, it seemed to Julie that her mother wasn’t focusing on all the real tragic possibilities, and the ruin of her little sister’s life.

  “I told her I’d go down to Woodside with her, be there when she tells them,” Julie said.

  “I wouldn’t, Julie, they’ll think you encouraged her or him, or something.”

  “I don’t even know him,” Julie protested. “I told her she could go with me to Greece. Grandpa Ran could help with the expenses.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Peggy agreed, wondering who would ever suggest it to him.

  24

  The world does not like a sponge.

  Lorna had begun to feel the judgmental eyes of Pam’s doormen calculating that she’d been overstaying Pam’s hospitality. Their perhaps imaginary disapproval was the impetus, finally, to give up on most of her requirements and decide faute de mieux to take the next affordable apartment no matter how grim.

  And Ursula had found one for her rather nearby as it turned out, on Larkin just off Union, in a modest frame duplex dating from the 1900s. There were horrible linoleum floors in some places, but she would get rugs and stylish furniture from Ikea, as all the young people did nowadays, enhanced by an artful antique or so; she could perhaps ask
to take back one or two nice family pieces she’d given Peggy all those years ago when she left for France and Peggy had been getting married.

  Despite having kept its original moldings, her new place was really pretty shabby—all the rooms painted hospital green—hence the rent only a little more than she’d planned to pay; but she could have it repainted, and the elderly Chinese couple renting the other apartment seemed quiet and perfectly friendly. They appeared to her to be almost identical, the man and the woman, with thinning gray hair cut the same and matching eyeglasses, the same slightly crouching stance, wearing the cotton vests you saw everywhere in North Beach, and you would not know they were there except for the drying and dead chrysanthemums in the garbage. There was an overgrown patch of garden in back, a good feature they did not appear to care about, where Lorna would have a few vegetables—French beans, she hoped. She found American green beans horrible, big and fibrous; why couldn’t they think to grow the little French ones?

  As a younger woman, she would have been in tears at a place like this; but your expectations evidently faded along with your shrinking life expectancy. Really her spirits were good. She could move in as soon as she wanted, which was lucky, as Pam Linden was reclaiming her apartment in a week, announcing her return so promptly after Lorna told her she was leaving that Lorna feared that Pam had been waiting bags packed for the merest sign that she was getting out.

  She organized Hams for an Ikea run; she’d need sheets, lamps, a bed, right away. She got the phone and the electricity and gas put in her name the same afternoon she signed the lease, amazed at how quickly you could set up house in San Francisco. It would have taken a month in Pont-les-Puits, though doubtless faster in Paris. In Pont she’d have had to have a letter from the bank to have the lights put on.