Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  43

  In Woodside, Ran was mostly worrying about Gilda, and about the email he got from Dr. Karas in Paris one morning in early December, reporting that Gilda was having headaches—headaches a well-known symptom of preeclampsia, her diabetes a well-known predictor of it, and her teen age practically a guarantee of it. Gilda was almost bound to develop this menacing condition, and Ran had unconsciously been waiting for the call.

  In Paris, Gilda’s Olympian indifference to her pregnancy continued to puzzle Carla, and puzzled Julie, too, when she thought about it; Julie tried not to think about Gilda’s pregnancy, or rather the circumstances of its happening, and was confused by Gilda’s lack of connection to Ian, her lack of interest in him, almost as if they didn’t know each other, instead of being married. How could anyone be indifferent to Ian?

  “Have you talked to Ian?” Julie asked a time or two, but got the same answer, “No, we send the odd email.” The girl often spoke on the phone to her California friends and her parents, but never Ian, and yet there was nothing suspect about her indifference, no sense that she protested too much: it was true indifference. Both Julie and Carla agreed, out of Gilda’s earshot, that if it were they pregnant, they would be counting the days and watching their diets and making sure the responsible male got every detail; but Gilda made no concession to her condition. Just as the baby had been put inside her almost unnoticeably, so she imagined it would exit; she hadn’t focused on the travails of childbirth and the scary stories of pain, it would just slip out, like a quail’s egg.

  “In denial,” was Carla’s confident diagnosis.

  “I think she genuinely forgets,” Julie said.

  Gilda was having a romance instead with Virgil’s Aeneid, which they were reading in her Advanced Latin class; she loved Juno, so feminist, and Deiopea the Beautiful, which they tried different ways of pronouncing, and even pious Aeneas despite her suspicion of piety. “O Muse, inspire me, hear my song,” she would declaim, walking rapturously through the Bois de Boulogne in the glorious fall weather. Californians, none of them had experienced a real autumn before. Even Carla, in her dignified thirties, waded into piles of leaves and joyously kicked them.

  Gilda’s headaches had begun in late November, before the start of the December break but before they were set to return to California anyway. They came on in the late afternoons at first, and then after a week, they lasted all day. They weren’t terrible, but they were there, and she finally mentioned them on her weekly visit to Dr. Karas. That was the visit where he found her blood pressure had spiked up, too, and called her father. The two doctors agreed these were symptoms of mild preeclampsia.

  “She should fly home right now,” Amy argued, but Ran had more confidence in French medicine than Amy had.

  “Let her finish the semester, that’s mid-December. She loves her school. We don’t want her to get a negative sense or be resentful of the baby.” They had always been careful to let her do everything, even if it might hurt her, up to a point, so that she would not feel handicapped. Differently abled.

  Gilda’s own feelings decided the matter; she didn’t want to come home—she refused to come home. She knew the thing kicking in her belly must be addressed, but she was reassured when her dad said her headaches were probably a condition that was treatable. She would gladly continue seeing Dr. Karas and Dr. de Panapieu, who seemed super competent; she’d be fine. She didn’t want to leave Paris, especially before the end-of-term exams.

  In her heart she wanted to stay always, away from Woodside, social awkwardness, Saint Waltraud’s, Ian Aymes, his mother, the baby, Carla—everyone but her parents, they could come visit. They could all move to France; why did you have to be the nationality you started out as; lots of Americans had changed into American from Lithuanian or Polish, couldn’t you change the other way, become Mexican or Pakistani—or French? In France she could go on to study Greek and read Homer, eventually, and Sappho and Theocritus. And Russian; once you were good at transliteration in general, why not Russian, too?

  She preferred to think about Latin declensions, but once in a while, when the creature inside her kicked insistently, she did think about it. Whereas she’d been charmed by the idea of maternity at the beginning, the longer it took, and the larger her belly grew, the more she saw it—him? her?—as an impediment, and the sooner it got born the better. Then other people could help her and take it off her hands. She had no image of herself bending over its basket, or—super revolting—suckling it.

  She didn’t wish it ill—on the contrary, she wished it would start its successful life soon, just without her. She knew that all the lore predicted that she would feel differently eventually, the process known as bonding, as soon as she saw it. It was a biological fact. She thought of Marga, the Afghani woman swimming ashore with her baby on her head, or however she did it. Gilda supposed she could swim with a baby, she’d try to save any baby, the normal human response, but that didn’t make you motherly. Or maybe it did. Just the fact of being responsible for it made you motherly. If that were true, anyone—Julie?—could become its mother. Would Julie like a baby?

  Julie and Carla, charged with keeping an eye on Gilda, differed with each other about going home to California in view of Gilda’s worsening condition, pre-whatever. Julie, guarding her secret love of Ian, was tremendously in favor of California and didn’t mind leaving her course before the finals. “We were planning to go home soon anyway,” she argued, “and if we went now, it would save your parents the trip—you know they’ll be over here tomorrow morning otherwise.” No one could say to Gilda, We need to go because you and the baby could die if something went wrong and we were here instead of there. Such a thing hadn’t occurred to them until Julie googled Gilda’s symptoms.

  Now it also drifted through Julie’s mind that if the baby wasn’t born at all—or, rather, if there were no baby—there would be nothing to tie Gilda and Ian together. Then she was so appalled at the things that could occur to her unbidden that she said a prayer, not a religious prayer, more a Circle of Faith hope that such ideas not come to her again.

  Except for the looming threats of premature birth and/or returning to California, and Julie hating France generally, the three young women were otherwise happy in their little French ménage à trois and felt keenly the inconvenience if Gilda’s unfortunate pregnancy went wrong. Carla was still reveling in freedom from her California servitude, and therefore was on Gilda’s side in favor of staying and, besides, had met a nice Slovenian man in her Speak French class. They had taken to going together after class on Thursdays to hear a jazz trio at the Deux Magots.

  * * *

  —

  It was two weeks before the Christmas holidays would begin. Little Christmas market huts seemed to install themselves overnight along the Champs-Élysées and in Saint-Germain to sell woolen caps, bottle openers with horn handles, Russian amber, and ornaments made of straw. Tonight, in their apartment, Carla was making coq au vin jaune, a variation in Jean, Maître de Cuisine, a book they were cooking from now. She called Julie and Gilda to the table. They talked over their day. “I know it’s stupid, but I want to take my exams next week. It’s a matter of national honor,” Gilda said. “I’m the top in Latin, above this English girl Marigold Butler. Bottom in French, though.”

  “You aren’t the bottom,” Carla protested.

  “Nearly, but I don’t care.”

  Gilda had come home more than once to find Carla and Julie watching videos about maternity hospitals. “Why are you watching that?”

  “Look at this one, so cute.” On the screen a nurse whispers to a newborn as she dunks him in water the temperature of amniotic fluid. “They give the baby a spa treatment. He’s only ten minutes old, or half hour tops. You have to go to this place. All kinds of stars give birth there, it’s supposed to be the best.”

  “Oh, stop it. I’m going to give birth in the street,” Gilda
said. “On my way to school, and I’ll leave it in the bushes.” This startled Carla and Julie—it was the first note of discontent Gilda had sounded aloud, though her indifference had been obvious.

  Once someone rang the interphone in the late afternoon. Carla asked into the interphone who it was, but the others couldn’t hear the response. Carla shrugged and went to the door and waited for whoever it was to come up. It was a woman with a briefcase.

  “Bonjour, madame, mesdames,” said the newcomer. “Je suis venue d’AME. De la part de la ville…” They didn’t quite understand this puzzling declaration, heard as if she were from “Om.” Gilda, the one with the best French, the one the group expected to do the work of understanding here, said, “Pardon?”

  “L’Aide Médicale de l’État.” The newcomer struggled to accept that she was going to have to trot out her English.

  “Aide?”

  “De la ville de Neuilly-sur-Seine. Mon enquête concerne une jeune fille,” indicating Gilda. “I have come about the young lady. Puis-je—may I sit down?”

  “Please!” Carla jumped forward to indicate a chair.

  With difficulty they began to understand that some civic agency was inquiring into Gilda’s health and was offering, or maybe requiring, medical supervision.

  “There is l’EPDSAE, par example. L’Établissement Public Départemental pour Soutenir, Accompagner, Eduquer—to sustain, accompany, and educate this underage girl, unmarried, in state of difficulty. La France wishes to be sure she has what is needed. Has she seen doctors?” The woman looked intently at Gilda as she spoke.

  “Certainly,” Carla answered, feeling irritated that la France would think they would not get a doctor—or whatever it thought. “How did you happen to find us?”

  “The name, please,” the woman said, waving her pencil over a form on her clipboard.

  “You must have it, you found us.”

  “The name of zee médecin.”

  “Um, Karas. Really, this is not necessary.”

  “Le prénom?”

  They drew a blank. “Cyrille, I think,” said Carla.

  “The clinic where she will give birth?”

  To them, “clinic” conjured a grim charity ward, long waits. “She has a private doctor and will go to the hospital for difficult births, I’ve forgotten…Xavier. Xavier Karas is his name. The doctor.”

  “Maternité Port Royal,” said Gilda. She read that in the seventeenth century it was a hospital for allaitement. Lactation to feed abandoned babies. The idea had scared her, made her think maybe it was better to be back in California when the time came. “It’s a Monument Historique.”

  “She’s going to the Clinique de la Rossignol,” Carla corrected. She and Julie had cased hospitals and decided it looked like the best one, with its luxurious baby spa, and massages for the mothers. “Or else the American Hospital.”

  They were given to understand by the stern newcomer, evidently taking them for improvident runaways, that citizens were not born unnoticed in France, however widely they were ignored in the U.S. La France would be watching, concerned for the welfare of the coming baby. Though they were almost sure there wouldn’t be a problem, Gilda suddenly glimpsed the hope there could be some rule requiring her as its mother to stay in France. This was a new thought. She could imagine one of those international custody battles where France intervened on behalf of the mother of one of its citizens (herself) to keep her from being sent back to America against her will.

  When the woman had gone, Julie and Carla railed with Western gusto against state meddling, but Gilda said, “I almost forgot! Yay! The baby will be French! Will they even let it leave the country?” To anchor its Frenchness, she would give the baby a wildly French name, Antoinette-Clotilde or Marie-Louise-Camille instead of Pomona Deiopea as she had intended.

  “What if it’s a boy?” Carla said.

  44

  The Stanford fall term was well underway before enrollment for intramural soccer in November, and Ian was comfortable enough with his courses by then to estimate that he could fit sports into his schedule. A talented right midfielder, he was welcomed onto the intramural scene, which operated at a high, though not varsity, level. He was happy, a man with everything. He did think of Gilda, mostly when talking to his mother, but with affection, defined as mild interest and, when reflecting more deeply, panic. Julie was often in his thoughts.

  Ursula Aymes was driven frantic by Gilda’s absence abroad, and the likely departure to France of Ran and Amy, which would leave her without news of her grandchild-in-utero, and not knowing whether Ian was even in touch with Gilda. She renewed her efforts to cajole him into at least calling the mother of his child once in a while, or at a minimum emailing.

  “You need to show some interest,” she insisted. Ian protested that he was interested and concerned, of course, but didn’t like to intrude. He disciplined himself to send encouraging emails from time to time and always got a polite and friendly reply, but no real news about Gilda’s state and that of the fetus.

  “She’s reading in Latin at her school,” he told his mother. “The classics, the Aeneid.” Though Ian admired that, Ursula was crazed by it, accepting that Gilda might read anything she wanted, but finding Virgil so unsuitably far from the preoccupations she thought natural for someone expecting a child, so ditzy, even if Gilda was only in, what was it, the tenth grade! What could you expect? What was really going to happen to that baby when it was born? Would anyone notice?

  She could talk matters over with Ran Mott if he were around; she could expect straight talk from him, but she assumed he and Amy were on their way to Europe, presumably to see Gilda, and of course they wouldn’t think of sending her and Ian a word; she and Ian were supposed to just fester in ignorance as if paternal grandmothers had no interest and no rights. Fathers, either, though she avoided mentioning paternity to Ian, since it seemed to upset him and he would direct his irritation at her; and certainly she wouldn’t mention Ian’s part to Ran.

  “Don’t you even wonder?” she had once asked Ian. He knew the right answer, but she wasn’t convinced. He had said, “Of course I do,” but she doubted it.

  * * *

  —

  Because of Gilda’s preeclampsia, instead of Gilda running the risk of travel, Ran and Amy decided to spend the Christmas holidays in Europe. When Peggy told her mother about their plans, Lorna took the chance to do Armand-Loup a favor by suggesting to Peggy that Ran and Amy rent his farmhouse for the holidays; they didn’t have to know it had been hers; it was on VRBO now.

  Over the years, Julie and Gilda and even Carla had heard enough about the place in Pont from Peggy and Curt and Hams, and now that it was on VRBO, they could check it out themselves. Julie had memories of being taken there by her mother when she was a tot, and she talked up the beauties of this remarkably bleak, unvisited region.

  Peggy, wondering why she hadn’t thought of this before, suggested it to her father and Amy. In this big house, all of Ran’s progeny could be with him for the holidays.

  Thus it was organized that Gilda, Carla, and Julie would join Ran and Amy for Christmas in Pont. The girls could go there as soon as their classes were over, and Ran and Amy would join them when they could. If Ran and Amy were aware they were renting Lorna’s former home, they didn’t say. Never mind the tainted provenance of the house, with its checkered memories of Lorna. Though they suspected that Amy might not like being in Ran’s former wife’s former house, the young women looked forward to seeing a new part of France.

  Carla especially had weighed in with Ran about whether it would be safe for Gilda to get away from Paris. At first, Ran said no, definitely not safe; the longer the pregnancy endured, the better chance the fetus had of a trouble-free start in life, and any disruption that threatened to bring on early delivery shouldn’t be thought of. But he knew Gilda was determined to go with the others, and he di
dn’t want to impose any interdictions that would affect her positive attitude. With Gilda feeling fine and not at all near term, and with no warning signs of premature labor or anything ominous except the headaches, as long as her blood pressure was controlled and there were available hospitals in the French countryside, it would be okay. Anyway, at more than thirty weeks along, a fetus could survive, Ran had said to himself, although it would require enormous luck and high-tech effort if a baby did come early.

  Carla was not enthusiastic—didn’t want to leave Paris and her new boyfriend, and foresaw her role with the family if they did go: cooking and dishwashing. Gilda earnestly wanted to go. She had heard tales from her older half-siblings about the happy times spent in Pont-les-Puits on their school vacations, when Grandma Lorna was married to someone called Armand the Wolf—something the others tended not to discuss around Ran. Julie had reservations of her own.

  Julie wasn’t thriving. Sometimes, getting ready for dinner, she was attacked by a stab of free-floating sexual desire—she was so prone to this now. Her thoughts fastened on Ian, but she almost felt that anyone would do, men were so essential; what happiness that the world was full of men, what promise for being alive! Even if there were nothing to be done about it at the moment. Maybe if Gilda had her baby, Ian would come to see it and they could take up where they left off.

  Then, as Christmas neared, there was a change in Julie’s emotional and sexual life. Gilda had not thought to tell her that the British politician had visited Saint Ann’s British School, looking it over for one of his children, and that at the reception held for him, she had said, for something to say, “My sister—niece—Julie from San Francisco, would want to be remembered to you, from the Circle of Faith,” and he had politely agreed that he remembered the nice girl in San Francisco at the Circle of Faith who had dragged him to her grandmother’s cocktail party. That was the extent of Gilda’s conversation with him as she passed along the reception line, so how amazing that Julie should get a telephone call from him, asking her if she could by any chance assist him with some Circle of Faith–related events through the holiday season, in Paris, Geneva, and Lisbon: meetings and celebrations, organizing his plane tickets, schedule, and so on. His usual assistant had children and needed to stay in England through the holidays. Julie seized on this as the perfect salvation, a job! With pay! And it would be over with in time for her to be with her grandfather in Pont-les-Puits at least by New Year’s Eve.