An hour later, Jeanne and Liz were on the patio, hidden from Hilltop School by the oleander hedge, stretched out on the lawn furniture drinking Mexican beer. Jeanne wore shorts and a T-shirt and no bra. Her hair was down and she couldn’t remember when she’d last combed it. It was early for beer, but she had decided to make an exception because Liz was there, because it was only Corona, and because she had been feeling almost giddy since her blowup at Teddy that morning. True, she had lost the high ground when she lost her temper; but she felt so good remembering the omigod look on his face.
“I love my guest house,” Liz was saying, rolling a peanut between her palms to break the shell, “and I’m proud of what we’ve done with it, but it’s not the same as a school. A school matters.”
“That’s because children matter.”
“How come you never had any of your own, Jeanne?”
Other years, other visits they had talked about politics and economics, women’s issues, books and clothes, gossiped and recalled the time they stole golf carts and spent half a summer night tooling over Rinconada golf course, the summer they learned about sex from the little green book Jeanne found in her father’s bureau, barely recalled boyfriends, parties, scandals, the way things used to be. But this trip it was babies, all babies.
She said, “If you want to feel like you belong to something, like you’re connected . . .”
“Don’t start, Jeanne.”
Jeanne smiled and tipped her head back. The sky was a terrible clear enamel blue. If she reached up and laid her hand on it, the surface would be hard and slick like tile. No wonder it never rained. There was a tile barrier between the earth and sky. If the army shot holes in it, the rain would pour through like a shower-head.
She said, “I had a baby once. A boy.” James now Mark.
Jeanne felt Liz waiting.
“I never told anyone. We were in New York.”
The light on the patio became more intense, draining the color from the blossoms on the oleander bushes. She thought of the sun as an interrogator’s weapon focused on her. But no one had forced her to tell Liz about James. There was no third degree going on. Maybe holding the secret had become worse than the secret itself. Maybe this was the only way to convince Liz not to have an abortion. Maybe—probably—she’d had too much to drink.
“We put him up for adoption. Teddy said . . .” Jeanne watched the bubbles rise to the surface of her glass. Garrulous, confessional Mexican beer was at work here, and she wasn’t going to fight it. She wanted to talk, to blab, to tell all her nasty secrets, every one of them. If Liz could do it, if Hannah could . . .
“You were in grad school—”
Jeanne shook her head.
“But I thought—”
“I quit. Teddy said it was too much.” Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. She closed her eyes and made a sound that came out a groaning laugh.
“I think I should get you something to eat, Jeanne. And how ’bout some coffee?”
“Don’t take care of me. I can take care of myself.”
And now that I’ve begun, don’t give me an excuse to stop.
“I’ve always taken care of myself.”
That’s what happens to the children of drunks. They either fall apart or they become most marvelously self-sufficient.
Jeanne said, “My soul craves a Marlboro.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Go look on the end table in the living room, will you, Liz? There’s a Russian enamel box with cigarettes in it. Get me one, okay?” Jeanne laughed at the look on Liz’s face. “For godsake, it’s not the end of the world. I want to smoke, so let me smoke.”
Liz returned with one Marlboro, holding it at arm’s length between her index finger and thumb.
“I’ll buy you a gun but I won’t load it. If you want a match, you’ll have to find one yourself.”
Jeanne stood up, steadied herself on the back of the chaise, and made her way around an arrangement of glazed Mexican flowerpots to the gas grill. She lifted one end of the plastic cover and found a box of safety matches. “Ah-hah!” She scraped one on the grill, stood rocking slightly, the cigarette in her left hand, the match in her right, weaving before it.
I feel too good to kill myself, she thought and blew out the match. I feel wonderful.
She broke the cigarette in half. “I don’t believe I care to smoke after all. But I do want another beer.”
“Jeanne . . .”
“Lizzie, don’t. I choose to get a little tanked, unburden myself at long last and reveal my dirty secrets, and all of a sudden you’re Mrs. Grundy. Will you cut me no slack?”
Liz lifted her arms in a show of resignation. “Just stay put so you don’t hurt yourself.” Jeanne let herself be maneuvered back to the chaise and pushed gently down.
She had come home from lunch and had two shots of vodka from the freezer. She’d drunk three?—four?—maybe she’d had five?—beers. But she’d been drunk before and kept her silence. Something else had nudged her over the border into a new country.
Liz came back with the beer and set it on the table beside Jeanne’s chair.
“I made you a sandwich.”
“I ate.”
“If you’re going to drink, you have to eat.”
“What kind?”
“Just eat it.”
Ham and pepper cheese with iceberg lettuce.
She ate the whole sandwich, aware that Liz was impatient. “I’ve never told anyone this before. Teddy’d kill me.” She grinned, imagining his face.
“Just so you don’t wake up with a hangover, blaming me.”
“Just listen, will you? You know you’re dying to hear this.” Jeanne slurped the foam off her beer and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “I was pretty sure I was pregnant when we got married, but I didn’t tell anyone, of course.”
Hard to believe now the power of the taboo against unmarried mothers. Even going to the altar a little thick at the waist was a mortification to the family
Liz said, “It sure would have put a crack in your image.”
“My image? What was my image?”
“Same as now.” Liz shifted, brought her bare feet up under her on the chair cushion. “Always in control. You always know what’s happening.”
“My father—”
“Actions have consequences,” Liz intoned.
“Right.” Jeanne stared at the bright Corona label for a minute. “I threw up for three months. Teddy was furious when I finally told him.”
Jeanne heard Liz mutter something, but it was only background noise.
Not once in twenty-five years had she considered telling anyone what really happened in New York. Now that she was about to, she was perplexed to find the story no longer either vivid or all that shameful. What was Liz going to do when she heard it? Run from the house screaming, “Shame, shame”? And what if she did? Compared to the rest of her life would that be so terrible?
“He wanted me to have an abortion, but I wouldn’t listen to him. I was sure he’d love the baby once he saw it. And I had this superwoman image of myself. I was going to go to grad school, raise a baby, fix gourmet meals and be perfect.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Teddy said I was one of those people who had to learn the hard lessons by living through them. And if I wasn’t going to get rid of the baby, he was going to make me pay. So he cut me out of his life. For a few weeks he moved in with another grad student, a dancer. That was the consequence.”
“What a prick.”
“He started to have trouble in school and that’s when he came back. Columbia was hard for him. Not that he wasn’t smart enough, but there were so many distractions. Teddy loved New York.”
She’d seen him with the dancer once. Jeanne was walking back from the early service at St. John the Divine and saw them ahead of her, still dressed in Saturday night clothes. Teddy was doing a little dance step and the girl had hold of him by the waist. Looking back now, Jeanne knew it might have been bet
ter for both of them if he had stayed away; but in those days the idea would have burned a hole in her brain.
“He came back to me so I’d help him get through school. I ended up doing his work and mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell him to take a hike?”
Jeanne reached down and picked up one of the cigarette halves she’d tossed away.
“Look. If you decide to sail a boat across the Pacific, you have to sail it in bad weather and good. You don’t get to stop in the middle of the ocean and say, Gee, I don’t think I’ll do this anymore.” She paused to admire the metaphor and hiccupped. “We have a contract.”
“Yeah,” Liz said. “And he broke it.”
“That didn’t give me permission to do the same.” And I loved him. “All my life, I’d never imagined anyone would ever want me and then there was Teddy. He was smart and you remember how gorgeous he was and he had so much flair . . .”
“You can love anyone you like, Jeanne. You don’t have to explain.”
Jeanne split the thin cigarette paper with her nail and laid the half cigarette open like a patient at surgery. “Things were okay until around Christmas. I got sick and the doctor said I had to take it easy for the baby’s sake. Teddy said it was too stressful for me to be in grad school and pregnant at the same time and that’s why I got sick in the first place. He said the best thing was for me to drop out and then I could help him get his degree. I could go back afterwards.”
This part of the story did shame her. Teddy this and Teddy that and Teddy everything: couldn’t she think for herself in those days? The daring and resourceful always-to-be-trusted-and-relied-upon Jeanne. If she wasn’t running after her father’s approval, she was going for Teddy’s.
“But, Jeanne, you have a degree. I’ve seen it on the wall in your office.”
Jeanne removed bits of tobacco from the paper and blew them off her fingertips a few at a time.
“Fake.” She held her breath and waited for the world to end. “We bought it in New York from a man who forged passports and green cards. It cost a bundle, let me tell you. I always planned to go back to school eventually. Meantime, Teddy said it didn’t hurt anyone if I just put it up on the wall. He said it wasn’t any worse than beefing up a résumé.”
“But he got his.”
“Fair and square.” She smiled. “More or less.”
“How could you let him talk you into something like that?”
“Why’d you fuck that Brazilian soccer player?”
“Who?”
“You told me you never had one word of conversation. He couldn’t speak English and you—”
Liz groaned. “At the time . . .”
“Exactly.”
“That guy was one night, Jeanne. What we’re talking about now is a whole life. Your life.”
“I wanted him to love me. Haven’t you ever wanted anyone to love you? I wanted his praise. I was afraid of him.” Afraid of the final consequence, the consequence never spoken of but implicit in every conversation with her father. Do what I want or I will abandon you.
Like we abandoned Billy Phillips, Jeanne thought. Like we walked away and left him in the dirt because he frightened Hannah, because he was dim and strange and did not please.
Liz leaned forward and asked softly, “What happened to the baby, Jeanne?”
Jeanne tried sighing to relieve the pressure under her rib cage, but it stayed in place like a stalled weather front.
“He had a squashy little nose and his hair was almost black—like my brother’s. Beautiful.”
“Omigod, why didn’t you tell anyone? Did your folks know?”
Jeanne laughed shortly. “You must be kidding me. They would have counted backward. You know the way it was then.”
Liz lifted her hands and let them drop, stared at them, shaking her head.
“He was a colicky little thing. Not really healthy in that drafty old apartment. And he cried so much he interrupted Teddy’s sleep—”
“You brought him home from the hospital?” Liz’s face registered horror and pain at the same time.
Jeanne’s tongue seemed to have swollen to the size of a bath sponge. She drank the last of her beer. “We only had one bedroom and Teddy wouldn’t let me put the cradle in with us because he said it was bad for babies to sleep with their parents. So I made him a little nook in the living room, behind the bookcases. I made him a mobile with smiling faces dangling from it and hung it right over him so when he woke up he wouldn’t feel lonely.
From the instant I saw his squashy little nose and puffy eyes, I loved him more than I loved myself.
But not more than she loved Teddy.
“He couldn’t study at night. He said the baby and I were driving him out of the house, making him fail.
“Even when James was quiet he made little noises to himself, and Teddy said those irritated him more than yelling. Down the hall the Jamaican students partied five nights a week and that never troubled Teddy, but the little snuffling whimpers of a baby . . .
“In the end he wore me down with arguing. It took almost three months.”
“Three months.” Jeanne heard the break in Liz’s voice. “He recognized you. He must have been smiling.”
“Teddy said it was gas.”
“Christ, what a bastard.”
“I was worse. I just couldn’t stand up to him.”
“Like me and Bluegang.”
“Aw, shit, I suppose.”
When he told her not to pick the baby up because she’d spoil him, she did as she was told. When he said that nursing would ruin her figure and he hated saggy tits, she put James on formula. When he said James was a cross baby, a tense baby, a sickly baby because she was an uptight mother, she believed him. She was being selfish, he explained. She was cheating Teddy out of a good degree, cheating James out of a happy family, cheating some infertile couple that longed for a baby. James was driving him crazy and he couldn’t stand it much longer and she’d have to choose . . .
“So I chose.”
Between Teddy and James, between returning to her father with a baby, no degree and no husband. Or. A husband and His-and-Hers degrees. Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Tate: the perfect couple.
“He went to a good home, Liz. I made sure of that. In Rye. Probably better than any we could have made for him.”
“Have you tried to contact him?”
She spoke about her trip to Berkeley.
“He’s a grown man. You should know him.”
“He’d never understand.”
“Give him a chance.”
She knew she wouldn’t. A small part of Jeanne hoped James/Mark did not know he had once had different parents from those who raised him. Life would be easier for him if the truth were hidden. If he knew the truth it wouldn’t matter how good his adoptive parents were, nothing compensated for abandonment. She’d seen this demonstrated countless times among her boys at Hilltop. And she never wanted to explain how she had rejected him for a man she didn’t even like anymore. He had appeared happy and healthy when she watched him in Berkeley. Better he stay that way than know the truth.
“Have you told Hannah this?”
Jeanne shook her head.
They sat, heads back, staring into the empty sky.
Liz said, “I’ve never really known you, Jeanne. Not since we were kids anyway. I thought that you didn’t know me, but it goes both ways. This is such a huge thing to keep secret.”
“We each have a Rosebud, don’t we?” A sled. A rejected baby. A dead boy. “I’m not proud of what I did, Liz.”
“But you were so young.”
“That’s no excuse. I knew what I did was wrong.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Without being asked, Liz went into the house and came back with two more beers. They drank in silence.
“No wonder you want me to have the baby.”
“I don’t want you to give up your chance, your last chance.”
Liz walked to the edge of the pat
io where scarlet and gold bougainvillea, thriving in the drought, grew in neon profusion. She brushed a branch with the palm of her hand and the bracts disengaged and floated down like bright hot flakes.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this, but now I’ve heard your story, I’ve changed my mind. I think you have a right to know. If you don’t already.” Liz sat again. “Saturday night, when I went in to use the phone after dinner, Teddy came in and made a pass at me.”
Jeanne raised an eyebrow. “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re not the first.”
“Why do you put up with it? And don’t tell me it’s a contract because—”
“I love him. Or something like that.”
“Oh, Jeannie.”
“I wish I didn’t. Life would be easier if I didn’t. But he needs me and in that way I guess he’s kind of like James. My baby.”
“But he’s not a baby. He’s a man. And not a very nice one.”
“If I give up Teddy it means I gave James away for nothing.”
They heard footsteps on the gravel and Turner, the P.E. instructor, came through the oleander hedge.
“Adam Weed’s had an accident,” he said. “He’s in the infirmary.”
Hannah left Resurrection House in midafternoon. In Rinconada she stopped at Mario’s for onion focaccia and coffee beans and she was on her way up Casabella Road when, on a whim, she turned into the old town cemetery and parked her car near the caretaker’s shed.
“G’day to you, Mrs. Tarwater.” Brian, the caretaker, an Irish transplant who had never lost his brogue, spoke to her from his potting shed. “I was over by your parents this very mornin’ and they’re looking fine. But I’m sorry to say that veronica you put in last spring, it’s gone and died. I dug it up and put in a plug or two of new grass. We should be sayin’ novenas for rain, if you ask me.” To Brian the cemetery was more a garden than a graveyard.
Hannah thanked him for his work and strolled up the hill to where her parents were buried. She sat on the granite square marking her father’s grave and propped her feet against the edge of her mother’s stone.
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