Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  The Fringale! Lorna liked this reminder that the world is small, and she liked this woman for having been to Pont, and she remembered the quiche but had never ordered it. She asked Susan Warner-Ford if she would like some tea, regretting that she only had Earl Grey, nothing more exotic. They talked about food, and France, and Susan’s plans for new explorations in the Dordogne. They had quite a nice chat. Only when Susan Warner-Ford had left did Lorna realize she hadn’t heard what she wanted with Armie.

  Later, Lorna wondered about the strange visit, and had the paranoid thought, bearing in mind what had happened to the Chins, that she was being watched, maybe cased. Two strange women in one afternoon. She had a valuable painting in the house. Without unwrapping it, she put it carefully in the back of her closet and draped clothes over it.

  She didn’t know where to put the pinkie bone; you couldn’t just throw out someone’s bone. Maybe she should bury it in the garden. For the moment she put it in a nest of cotton wool in her sock drawer. It was rather pretty, had a sheen.

  At about seven o’clock she had a third visitor, Mrs. Chin, at her door with a little tray of something—ribs, as it proved, steaming deliciously.

  “We have so much of this, many of these, we thought you might accept some,” she said. At first Lorna was startled, but why was it any odder for Mrs. Chin to bring her food than for her to have taken them some, if only she had? It marked a new stage in their neighborliness. Lorna thanked her profusely and, when she’d gone, poured herself a glass of wine and tucked into the hot, spicy morsels, thinking agreeable, neighborly thoughts.

  35

  Who was it who said, “If you can’t fight them, join them?”

  Ran was starting to explore this strategy.

  “You’re going up to San Francisco? No need to drive myself then, Carla can drop me,” Ran said, observing Amy and Gilda in preparations for a trip to the city. This was a rare venture for Amy, who tended to do her shopping in Paris or Palo Alto.

  “We need to get Gilda some clothes,” she said.

  “To fit her expanding figure.” Ran’s tone made plain that he saw any concession to Gilda’s condition as defiance of himself. Not that he ruled Amy, but he had tried to explain—and just couldn’t make her understand—the health issues for Gilda and the high incidence of birth defects, the danger of eclampsia and other life-threatening results for diabetics, which, added to the social implications of a fifteen-year-old having a baby, made it imperative to terminate Gilda’s pregnancy, and the clock was ticking. Gilda was now by his calculation about six weeks’ pregnant, and in a week or so, an ultrasound would show the beating of a fetal heart. This was bound to enrapture the two women, and harden Gilda’s determination. Right-to-lifers counted on this reaction; in some states there were laws forcing pregnant women to look on a screen at the little throbbing cells.

  About pregnancy termination, he had been peculiarly paralyzed, unwilling to drag Gilda to the hospital kicking and screaming, which is what she threatened, hoping she’d come to her senses, hoping she’d miscarry, hoping for some event that would convince her to think of her own health and demonstrate to her how unwise childbirth would be for her. Mrs. Klein had no influence; evidently he himself had no influence. Amy was officially on his side, but her ambivalence was clear to Gilda, and he felt she had come to act a little coldly to him, distant and preoccupied, he knew because of this situation, as if he could change the facts of biology. He was also aware in himself of a paradoxical sense of wonder that their lives could take such a strange turn, his especially, in late middle age, or was it early old age?

  “It’s another deposition today,” Ran said. “It shouldn’t take above an hour.”

  “We can go together. Gilda has invited her friend Bookney, they have a meeting they want to go to. I’ll go to Macy’s. You and I could have lunch afterward,” Amy said.

  Gilda’s school, Saint Waltraud’s, was mostly a day school, but had several boarders, one of whom, Bookney Ravanel from Virginia, was one of Gilda’s best friends, and the two girls had planned to go to San Francisco for a day in the city and to attend a lecture at the Circle of Faith, a group, Gilda explained, that her sort-of-cousin-actually-niece Julie was mixed up with, where they had very interesting programs. She couldn’t explain its slightly mysterious aura of virtue. She told Bookney about the slave.

  CF meetings took place in an apartment with mostly glass walls and a fabulous view over San Francisco and the bridges and bays. Gilda hadn’t thought of it before, but of course this location must belong to a very rich person. Members of the Circle welcomed the two girls, who were the youngest people in the room, and gave them brochures. The opulence of the surroundings was reassuring, but the absence of people in their age group was a little alarming, as if they had blundered into something X-rated, all these well-dressed adults looking clammed up, as if they would not begin their activity till Gilda and Bookney were not there.

  Gilda actually enjoyed the Circle of Faith more without Julie, who had a sort of proprietary manner when it came to the meetings. Here with her friend Bookney, people came up to them in the friendliest way and did not seem to find them young. There were always a few African and Indian people at the meetings, in their saffron tunics and sea-green saris, as well as well-dressed San Francisco women and students from Berkeley and SF State. Gilda had heard that a former British prime minister or something like that was sometimes there, but she had never seen him. Gilda didn’t know if Julie would be there—Julie hadn’t been down to Woodside in a couple of weeks, with the explanation that she was starting a summer-school session at Berkeley.

  The program today was going to feature a woman who had walked with her baby from Afghanistan to Munich, running away from unfair punishment after being made to marry someone whom her society said she had to marry. Now she went around lecturing on the condition of women in Afghanistan, victims without money or jobs, beaten by their husbands or worse. Also, if you were a girl in Afghanistan, you couldn’t go to school, and they had a custom of mutilating you Down There; your own mother would take you in to have it done. Gilda couldn’t help but reflect that if something was to be done to end her baby, it would be her own father who would take her to have it done. She of course didn’t mention all this to Bookney.

  When the speaker came in—a dramatic black-haired woman wearing a headscarf and shawls over an attractive pantsuit—they were reassured that the event was as scheduled, and that they had come on the right day. The audience settled down; plates of cookies and coffee urns waited on the sideboard. Louise and Roger Brody, whose apartment it was, welcomed everybody, and Louise introduced the intrepid walker, Marga someone, a name hard to catch, or even nonexistent.

  “In some categories, Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world for women,” the speaker Marga began. “The dangers are rape, feticide, honor killing, genital mutilation, economic powerlessness, and absence of health care. The most dangerous thing a woman can do, or have done to her, more often, is pregnancy. Then her chances of survival are only fifty percent. There are no doctors, no post- or prenatal care, no pediatrics.

  “The second-most-dangerous thing she can do is think for herself. If it should strike her that she doesn’t want to marry the ugly old goatherd, or that she’d like to become a doctor, or hear a musical concert, she is also in danger of her life.” In the slideshow, Gilda and Bookney saw the faces of the women in Marga’s village, lovely, some of them, but veiled and not smiling, just staring hopelessly out. Gilda began to feel a little odd, maybe just with empathy. Things women had to bear that she hadn’t thought of. She herself was transgressing two of the things that could mean her death in Afghanistan—pregnancy and thinking for herself. There was something thrilling to think of her situation that way.

  What if the baby was a girl and had to live in some country like Afghanistan? By what slim accident had she herself been born in Woodside, not Kabul? Sh
e had always been aware of her privileged life—Amy and Ran had drummed it into her about good manners and noblesse oblige, though they didn’t put it like that. Awareness and gratitude were what they emphasized. She saw that she had more than most people, but believed she paid for it with her diabetes, that there was a sort of karmic equivalence. Now Marga made her see that there was not; there was just the fact that some people were luckier than others, without there being any reason.

  Gilda didn’t know why these thoughts were extra strong today; she’d had them before, the feeling of being undeserving and at the mercy of capricious fortune. Whenever Gilda thought of the baby growing inside herself, she began to feel woozy, thinking of the things in store for it, it not having asked to be born, maybe marked for unhappiness or illness. She knew the woozy feeling was probably morning sickness, as the books predicted; she was often on the cusp of wooziness these days. At school she just said she had eaten something, and they were used to her health issues anyhow. Now she felt faint. She looked at Bookney and saw that tears were standing in Bookney’s eyes, too, at the things Marga was saying.

  Marga and her baby crossed from Afghanistan to Iran on foot. Then they had to travel across Iran to Turkey, and got some sort of ride in a cart to Istanbul. Smugglers took them to Lesbos, in Greece. She paid the smuggler twelve hundred dollars, but the baby went along for free. They almost drowned when the raft to Greece leaked, but they were near to the Greek shore, and she, unlike many, could swim the short distance, even with the baby, even with her robes weighing her down.

  But then after they fell into exhausted sleep on the Greek island, someone took her baby. He was nowhere, just gone from his blankets. Why? No one had seen him. Gilda saw that Marga’s escape would have then been easier without the baby, but she accepted that Marga probably wouldn’t feel that way. She thought of the story they read in English class by Joseph Conrad where someone says, “The horror! The horror!” which pretty much described Marga’s conclusion: the heart of darkness exists, and not only in Africa. The more Gilda read about the world, the clearer it became that the heart of darkness was everywhere.

  Gilda and Bookney stayed for the tea or juice and cookies. A cookie helped with the wooziness. Gilda hoped Julie might show up, but she didn’t. Instead they fell into conversation with a nice older woman who told them some things about the Circle of Faith, including about the Retreat Facility in the Alexander Valley where you could go to meditate and get your head together for a low weekly fee. Gilda tucked this information away, as she was wont to do these days with information that could serve in her situation in case she needed to escape or hide.

  36

  Divine intervention can’t be counted on.

  After a few more weeks, Ran abandoned his hope that Gilda’s pregnancy would end spontaneously and stepped up his vigilance about her day-to-day health. She had always been responsible and careful with her blood sugar and other numbers, and she claimed to be in good control of her diabetes as usual, and to be checking her numbers more often than before. “Before” was ideally three times a day. He couldn’t quite bring himself to sit her down and hear him out about the importance of even better control for her fetus and herself; to do that would be too much like approval or acceptance of her condition, and he wasn’t there yet.

  “I’ve made an appointment for Gilda with Frank Gill, a gynecologist with a specialty in diabetes,” Ran remarked to Amy at breakfast. “I’ll take her, because I want to talk to the guy about the general subject of diabetic pregnancy.”

  Amy was plagued by the suspicion that Ran intended to do…something. Maybe something to make Gilda miscarry, though it was officially too late for the abortion pill. It would be like him to take the matter into his own hands, and to get his own way, despite Gilda’s wishes. This mistrust made her miserable; Ran was her best friend as well as the only person she could turn to in this crisis, and here she was mistrusting him.

  “Shouldn’t I go with you?” Amy said to Ran. “In case he says things we both should hear? Can’t you talk to Dr. Thing without taking Gilda? She has her regular doctor. She likes him.”

  “She should be with someone who specializes in diabetes.”

  And whom in this situation could they trust to help and advise about the practical question of what to do about the incipient scandal? Carla had a lot of practical common sense, but she seemed strangely hostile to the whole subject of Gilda’s plight. She had the Catholic view against abortion, and she also had the Catholic view about marriage, its sanctity and being required for being pregnant, though she wouldn’t admit to attitudes so square. What Carla was hoping for, and Amy understood this, was a beautiful wedding, white dress and orange blossoms, soon, before Gilda was showing. Amy had naturally ruled this out, but Carla, thinking it would be making the best of a bad situation, was in favor of the marriage of Ian and Gilda, Gilda in white lace, maybe in the garden, Gilda’s age notwithstanding.

  Gilda’s delight in her pregnancy was evident to both Ran and Amy, and it added to their dismay. She was excited and elated. They reproached themselves that they’d never given her a sense of the realities of adult life, about money, or social disapproval, or the hardships of child-rearing, or the need for an education. She’d been too sheltered, a maiden in a bower. They could keep sheltering her now, and the baby, too, but they also had a sense this would in the long run be a disservice, cutting her off from…from what they couldn’t say. From having a good character formed from understanding others, and partaking of their struggles. Whatever people meant when they told someone “Grow up!” they felt now about their own child. Somewhere along the line you had to understand the solemnity and importance of life. You had to feel its pain.

  Ran remembered asking his own father why he, nine-year-old Randall, had to go to Sunday school when his parents didn’t go to church like other parents, and his father had said, “We had to go when we were your age, it’s part of your education.” Education was what Gilda needed, and a little pain, which she was not feeling at all. The school of hard knocks. They earnestly asked themselves whether their wish to hasten her interface with reality now didn’t contain a little envy, too, of her blithe nature and confidence in the world.

  “We should have them to dinner,” Amy said one night.

  “Who?”

  “Ian and Ursula,” Amy said.

  “I would like to know your reasoning around that,” Ran said, his usual way of signaling resistance, no matter what her proposition was to be.

  “We’ll always have this connection to them, no matter how it turns out, we might as well get to know them. Reach out.”

  “No, Gilda will go back to Saint Waltraud’s slender and normal; Ian will do whatever he does, we’ll see Ursula occasionally as we always have, and it will never be spoken of.”

  “Did you sleep with Ursula, back when you dated her?”

  “I don’t think so. There wasn’t so much of that then. We only had a couple of dates, to people’s parties.”

  “I think there was plenty of that in Ursula’s life—all those husbands.” He probably did, Amy thought, but she didn’t continue her inquiry.

  It was Ran who pressed on: “We do not have any connection to Ursula and Ian and we don’t need to have them to dinner.”

  “Ursula will be our co-grandparent,” Amy reminded him, hastily adding, “if Gilda were to…”

  “Forget it, Amy, she is not going to have that baby.” This brought them to their usual impasse, which was understood to mean that, while officially Amy and Ran agreed against Gilda’s wish for a baby, unofficially Amy leaned to Gilda’s side and was even willing to care for the baby herself. Ran understood this very well, but couldn’t resist from time to time making Amy restate her solidarity with him, even at the price of her increasing frostiness.

  “I thought next week, midweek; Wednesday is what I proposed to Ursula.” They would come, no doubt. Ran d
idn’t take his objections any further, but looked ahead with dread to a confrontation with the criminal young man who had violated Gilda. What had Amy been thinking to ask him here?

  “Can you think of a couple more people?” Amy asked.

  “Since it’s a family affair, maybe Julie, she knows the sordid details.” They asked Gilda to invite Julie, but when she did, Julie said she couldn’t come, which was unlike her: “Want to come to dinner with Ian and his mom?” Shocked expression. “Uh—ah—I can’t.” Formerly she had seemed always free, and always delighted to come. Amy had sometimes even thought Julie might be grateful for a good dinner, so available had she always been; girls that age ate so badly and didn’t look after themselves. Maybe Julie didn’t like Ian, she thought. On feminist grounds. What he’d done to Gilda.

  Ursula looked forward to the dinner, which she hoped would clarify the future. Were they family now? Or had they been summoned to hear bad news? She interpreted the invitation as familial, a sign of a new relationship with the Motts, and also a sign that Gilda was planning to go through with the pregnancy. She told Ian that was her interpretation. Ian had no response. He longed to be in the arms of Julie; after their lovemaking, they usually discussed together new developments as they arose but had no views. They couldn’t ill-wish an unborn baby or Gilda, either.

  He had accepted his mother’s view that he was now in for the long haul of fatherhood. When he thought of the reality, he felt light-headed, but could dismiss any apprehensions by focusing on the Stanford fall semester and his new academic chances, which in the long term would help him be a responsible parent.

  There had been joy when Ian’s application to transfer to Stanford in the fall was accepted, pending good grades in his summer courses, and this was a positive development sure to endear him to the Motts. He himself was excited and surprised, and looked forward to announcing it at the dinner with the Motts. But Ursula found herself otherwise exasperated at Ian’s lack of affect about his impending fatherhood. He went out nights, but not to see Gilda; she wasn’t sure whom he did see. She found herself saying more than once, a sort of shock tactic, “I think you should do the right thing and marry the girl,” even though it was certainly not what a young man ought to do, saddle himself with wife and baby, let alone a wife barely into her teens. Ian’s response was to laugh that the Motts wouldn’t dream of letting Gilda get married. “She’s only just starting tenth grade.”