Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  Later that evening, after Frances is sure her mother isn’t going to return for her overnight case, she places it in the closet. She supposes her mother’s toothbrush is inside, her nightgown, a pair of shoes—things she’ll wish she hadn’t left behind—but that was her own fault, the way she’d stormed out.

  Rudy’s been mostly quiet since her mother left, but now he says he’s sorry.

  “For what?” Frances says. “You didn’t do anything wrong. We made a mistake. We’re not living in the Dark Ages anymore. She’s the one who should apologize.” Not really believing what she says.

  Rudy asks, “Who did she mean? The man twice your age?”

  “No one,” Frances says. “Just a boyfriend I had for a while. A very short while.”

  Rudy goes silent again, and then he asks, “Are you keeping the foreigner’s baby? You should likely tell me what your plans are.” Frances thinks she hears a bit of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Don’t you turn on me too,” she says.

  “I’m not,” Rudy says. Then he says, “She is your mother. She’s worried about how the world will see you. You need to consider that. I think we should get married.”

  “No,” she says. “I told you.”

  Tell him, she thinks. Tell him you are already married.

  But she can’t, and the thought that she’s still living a lie—even though her mother now knows about the baby—makes her cry again.

  Nothing Rudy says is a comfort.

  THE CALL COMES from a neighbour woman just days before Christmas. Frances can’t absorb the news—the woman is saying that her father is dead of a massive heart attack, the result of being kicked in the chest by a cow. It can’t be true. Where is her mother? Frances asks. Resting, the neighbour says; she’s had a terrible shock. The neighbour has already checked the bus schedules and tells Frances what to do: come immediately, she’ll pick her up in town.

  Frances catches the next bus to Elliot. She doesn’t wait for Rudy to come home from wherever he is—the gym, indoor soccer—but writes him a note and leaves it on the kitchen table. She dresses in a way that mostly hides her pregnancy and takes a taxi to the bus depot. Five hours later, the neighbour picks her up at the bus and delivers her to the farm. The woman says things on the way—she’s so sorry, such a freak accident, her father was such a good man—but Frances barely hears her.

  “Frances,” her mother says when she sees her. She’s lying on the couch under a blanket, the teapot on the coffee table beside her.

  The neighbour woman leaves them alone.

  “I was waiting for you,” her mother says. “I can go to bed now. We both can, although I don’t suppose we’ll sleep.”

  Nothing is said about her missing father. Nothing about the baby.

  In the days leading up to the funeral, Frances avoids giving anyone the opportunity to guess that she’s pregnant. She goes to her room whenever people drop by to offer condolences and deliver food, shake their heads at a tragedy. Terrible time of year for such a thing, they say, well, no time is good, but Christmas . . . makes you wonder if there’s anyone looking out for decent people, doesn’t it? At the funeral—in the United Church, with the long-haired minister presiding—she sits next to her mother in a bulky sweater. There’s a reception in the basement after, and Frances sits by herself, her belly hidden beneath a tabletop, and people mostly leave her alone, other than to squeeze her hand or pat her on the shoulder on their way by. All she can think about is how she’d disappointed her father and never got a chance to make it up.

  In the days that follow, the neighbours pitch in to help Alice with the milking and the chores until she can decide what she’s going to do—attempt to carry on alone, find a hired man, sell the cows—but whatever she decides, she tells Frances, they might as well start boxing things up, because sooner or later she’ll be selling the farm and moving to town. Not a single word has yet been said about the pregnancy or Frances’s plans, nothing about Rudy. Nothing about Joe Fletcher, although Frances does overhear a neighbour woman telling her mother that she’d heard Joe Fletcher had moved to British Columbia to work in the bush.

  She stays home for ten days, tortured by the thought of her father sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee cup, not wanting to believe he’s gone, but knowing he is. She tries to make a start on sorting through the things stored in her closet, but she doesn’t get very far. She wants to tell her mother that she doesn’t have to worry—the baby is a mistake she won’t make again, one that won’t get in the way of her education—but her mother withdraws into deep silence, and Frances returns to the city with nothing resolved between them.

  She hopes her father is watching from somewhere.

  She hopes he can see inside her, and know that her intentions have never been bad.

  THE SEMESTER HAS barely started when Rudy disappears. He simply doesn’t come home one day. When he still isn’t there two days later, Frances goes to the foreign students’ office because she doesn’t know where else to go. It’s immediately clear that the woman behind the desk knows something, but she isn’t about to tell Frances. She can’t, she says, because Frances isn’t family. Frances starts to feel faint and has to sit in a chair and put her head between her knees, and she hears herself saying to the woman, “I’m pregnant.”

  “Rudy Busanti is the father, then?” the woman asks, and Frances says that he is.

  The woman takes pity on her. “I’m not supposed to say . . .” but then she does. She tells Frances that Rudy’s father has withdrawn him from school and taken him away. She doesn’t know where to, or if she does, she isn’t letting that part slip.

  Rudy must have told his father about Frances and the baby. New England. London. Egypt. How will she ever go about finding him? It’s hopeless. He will have to find a way to return to her.

  She waits to hear from him but nothing comes. No letter. No phone call. She quits going to classes. Her belly grows as she waits to hear from Rudy, certain that he will escape the clutches of his family and come back. But nothing. No contact at all. Surely he can find a way to write or call, she thinks. Finally, she has to accept that he’s not coming back, that he does not want to come back to a pregnant girl who refuses to marry him, or even if he does, he is not prepared or able to defy his family. She has to accept that she is one more girl with a baby inside her and the baby’s father no longer in the picture. She’s been deserted.

  She doesn’t know what to do. She’s sure she’s failed all her classes by now. She decides to find the women’s centre at the university, but when she does, she stands for half an hour outside the door without going in. A woman leaving the office notices her and asks if she can help, and Frances says she’ll come back later.

  She catches the bus in front of the university and gets off at her stop and walks the last few blocks to the apartment, considering her options, no longer sure of anything. As she goes to step over a snow bank and cross the street, she loses her balance and falls over, not hard, but with both legs deep in the crusty snow and her belly weighing her down as though she’s got heavy stones in her coat pockets. When she tries to push herself up, her arms sink into the snow and she’s stuck there. The snow has got inside her winter boots, her mitts, the sleeves of her coat. It must be the hormones again, she thinks as she feels the tears coming. She half-sits, half-lies in the snow bank and cries until one of the art students—a girl she recognizes—comes along, not on the sidewalk but sliding up the middle of the street as though she’s ice-skating, and she sees Frances there and offers her an arm, with which Frances manages to get herself back on her feet. The girl is wearing an old fur coat and a multicoloured striped knit scarf and matching mittens.

  She asks Frances if she’s all right.

  Frances says no, she isn’t all right, she’s a mess, pregnant and with nowhere to go, which the girl takes to mean homeless. Frances is surprised that the girl doesn’t recognize her as the one who looks down from the rooftop, but maybe she hasn’t seen her there, m
aybe she’s never looked up.

  “Come with me,” the girl says. She tells Frances her name is Edie, as in Edie Sedgwick. Frances doesn’t know who Edie Sedgwick is.

  “Was,” the girl says. “She died.”

  “Like everyone else,” Frances says, feeling more sorry for herself than she ever has.

  Edie takes Frances home to the art students’ house and sits her in a rickety bamboo chair at an old wooden kitchen table painted the colour of Velveeta cheese. She gets her a glass of milk and makes her a peanut butter sandwich. Frances eats it. She doesn’t tell her she lives across the street. Edie says there’s an extra bed that no one is using at the moment if she needs a place to crash. The house, she says, is a co-operative. “Just do your share,” she says. “Put money into the kitty when you can, clean the bathroom, wash the dishes—whatever you can do to help out.” Frances takes all the money she has in her purse and puts it in the jar in the cupboard.

  A boy with long hair in a ponytail comes into the kitchen carrying a paperback book with his finger holding his place. He tells Edie that he thinks the author and his friends were desperate to find authenticity in a world driven mad by war. They were looking for something genuine and beautiful, he says, as an antidote to greed. He waves his hands in a way that takes in everyone in the house, including Frances, and says, “Everything wrong that happens here, in this house, is about greed.”

  “You are so full of shit,” Edie says. “If you’re so into Kerouac, why don’t you hit the road?”

  “Who are you?” the boy says to Frances.

  “Just Frances,” she says.

  She stays with the houseful of art students for two weeks, sleeping on a narrow cot in a hallway, like a person waiting for a bed in a hospital. During the day, she sits on the ragged couch in the living room, watching the ebb and flow of the house, people coming and going, listening to the unfamiliar music of the various occupants, and she thinks she doesn’t understand any of it. One girl asks her if she is considering a home birth, because if so, she knows a midwife. Frances says she hasn’t really thought about it, which is true, she has not thought at all about the moment when this baby decides to make its way into the world. She hasn’t even been to a doctor.

  In the evenings, a joint gets passed around, or a water pipe, hash burning between a pair of hot knives, and she says no thanks and wonders if the smoke in the room will deform the baby. She wonders what her hair would look like if she grew it long. One evening there’s a new girl in the living room, one who has been away and just came back. She’s wearing a long Indian skirt and she keeps looking at Frances, studying her. Eventually, she says, “I’ve been thinking you look familiar. Don’t you live across the street? I’m sure you’re the one I’ve seen on the roof.” Edie, the girl who saved her from the snowbank, looks at her accusingly and says, “Really?” Frances doesn’t know what to do, so she gets up from the couch, retrieves her coat from the closet, and leaves. She crosses the street to her own house, sure they are all watching her from the main floor window.

  The next morning, she phones her mother.

  By the end of the week, she’s back in Elliot.

  THE BABY IS stillborn. In the hospital, they ask Frances if she’d noticed that the baby had stopped moving. She says no. They take that to mean the baby was moving, but what she really means is that she hadn’t noticed one way or the other. She didn’t know how much a baby was supposed to move.

  Her mother takes care of everything, and within days of the baby’s birth, Rudy and the pregnancy are things of the past, things that didn’t happen, just like Joe Fletcher. Frances goes from the hospital in Elliot to her bedroom at the farm and stays there for a month, and then she begins to pack her possessions into boxes because her mother is planning to move into Vince’s house.

  When her mother thinks enough time has passed after the baby, she sits with Frances at the kitchen table and pours them each a cup of tea and says, “You’re not the first girl to get herself into trouble.”

  Frances hates the term “in trouble.” She won’t use it.

  Her mother says, “That boy, no matter how much you think you loved him . . . the baby . . . well, I’m just thinking of you when I say it’s all for the best. You’ve been lucky once again. I hope you’ll come to see it that way.”

  Not so long ago, at this same table, Alice had slapped Frances for her insolence. Now it’s Frances’s turn. Alice holds her hand to her face, where a red mark is forming.

  “You deserved that,” Frances says, everything she’s feeling compressed into those three words.

  Her mother says, her chin trembling, “I only want the best for you.”

  “No, you don’t. You want me to be less trouble, to go away and get good grades and be a success you can brag about.”

  Her mother, fighting back tears, says, “I don’t understand you, Frances.”

  It’s like a confession, and Frances realizes that she doesn’t understand her mother either; they don’t understand each other, and probably never will. She says, “That’s the real disappointment, isn’t it? You should have had more than one child.”

  Her mother looks at her, her hand still rubbing her cheek. “There’s so much you don’t know,” she says. “In spite of what happened to you, a woman doesn’t just snap her fingers and have another child. Don’t you think your father wanted a son? All men do.”

  Another barb, but another confession at the same time. She’d never imagined her parents had failed at having more children.

  Then her mother pushes away from the table and carries her cup to the sink. With her back to Frances she says, “And don’t go thinking that means your father didn’t love you enough. He loved you just as much as I did. As I do.”

  Frances takes this in, sees the mountain her mother has climbed to say these words.

  She says, “Mom, is there anyone we can call in England? Would you like to take a trip back there? After you sell the farm? Maybe I could come with you.”

  Silence, and then her mother says, “There’s no one. Anyway, it’s too late for that.”

  Too late, as in too many things for the two of them to get past? Or too late for her to return to England?

  Her mother clarifies: “I have no interest in going back.”

  A neighbour drives into the yard just then, the one who has made an offer on the farm, and Alice goes outside to speak with him.

  Frances sits at the table by herself, feeling like an orphan.

  WHEN SHE RETURNS to the city, she is relieved to find that the apartment she’d shared with Rudy has not been cleaned out and rented to someone else. She boxes up the belongings that Rudy left behind—textbooks, a few clothes, his gym bag and soccer ball—and as she’s going through the drawers and closets, she finds her mother’s white overnight case. She should hang on to it, she thinks, take it back to her, but it reminds her of the day when her mother came and Rudy was still here, and she moves it to the pile of things she’s getting rid of. When she’s finished sorting, she takes it all to the Salvation Army in a taxi. Afterward, she climbs out the bedroom window and sits on the roof. It’s April, spring, but the air has not yet warmed up and she watches her own breath rise as though she’s smoking a cigarette. If she had a cigarette, she thinks, she would smoke it. Music comes from the house across the street—Joni Mitchell. She guesses that Joni is the choice of the gypsy in the long skirt.

  She returns to school for the spring session. Although she’d been given an incomplete grade in all her classes the previous semester, the dean allows her to continue her study of general arts and science because of extenuating circumstances. When she’s asked to choose a major, she selects psychology. She doesn’t know why, maybe because she suspects she’s a lost cause and wants to find out the reason. She registers for two spring classes, but she begins sleeping in every morning, and by the middle of the session she’s hardly going to school at all. She fails both classes, and she doesn’t bother registering for the summer.

&nb
sp; She goes back on the pill and begins going out in the evenings, to a hotel bar near the university, where students congregate. She sits by herself until some boy—there’s always a willing boy—picks her up, and then she goes home and sleeps with him, never in her apartment, never staying the night, walking home afterward by herself along some dark city street. She doesn’t care what the boy’s name is. In fact, she tells them not to give her their real names, and she calls them all Steve McQueen, after the actor who’d dropped out of Hollywood and was travelling around the country in a motorhome. He might be in Canada, who knows. She makes up different names for herself: Lulu, Maggie, Isabel. There isn’t one boy who ever asks to see her again, and she likes it that way. Once, when she’s sitting by herself at a table in the bar, she overhears a group of girls talking about another girl (“She gives them whatever they want”), and she realizes she’s the one they’re referring to. Later, when she’s leaving with a new Steve McQueen, they pass the table of girls and she stops and says, “For your information, it’s not what they want that matters.” They look at her as though she’s crazy and she says, “Come on, Steve. Let’s go figure out what I want.”

  One boy after another. Frances is drunk every second night. A tough-looking waitress at the bar, an older woman named Josie, takes her aside and says, “Careful, honey. You’re going down a bad path here.” Frances says, “Thanks, but mind your own business.”

  Until she wakes up one day at the end of August, and she’s in her own apartment, in her own bed, and there’s a boy in the bed with her. He has curly blond hair. It’s hot in the room and his hair is sweaty, sticking to his forehead, making him look vulnerable, like a child. Somehow, she knows that he’s a nice boy, or at least nice enough, and she recoils from this knowledge, slips quickly from the bed as though she’s discovered a spider under the sheets. She doesn’t want to know anything more about him than what she’s already sensed, doesn’t want to know his name, but she sees his wallet on the floor next to his jeans, and she looks inside and sees that his name is Daniel. She remembers a conversation, laughter. The fact that Daniel plays the bagpipes. She doesn’t want to know this either. She puts his wallet in his jeans pocket and then wakes him up and says, “Go home, Daniel. Right now. Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. Just go home and don’t call me, and don’t come back.” Daniel slips out of her bed and quickly dresses, and when the door closes after him, she gets in the shower, and begins to feel as though she’s walked through a dark and dangerous tunnel and has emerged, in spite of herself, at the other end. She strips the sheets from her bed and makes a trip to the coin laundry to wash them. When she gets home, she flushes her birth control pills down the toilet, not caring that she’s in the middle of a cycle. She takes the bus to the university and registers for the fall semester—she’s on probation, they tell her, because of the failed classes. She buys a new bathing suit and starts to swim every day at noon in the university pool. One day in the middle of the afternoon, Frances stops at the hotel bar where she’d met all the Steve McQueens and finds Josie there waiting tables, as she hoped she would be. She thanks her for trying to save her from herself. Josie pretends she doesn’t remember, but Frances knows she does.