The Love Children

by Marylin French

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you start to worry that one day she might do that to you?”

  “No. I admired her. What guts!”

  I wondered about that a little, but most of what we said to each other was conveyed by shining eyes and smiling mouths and glowing skin. We didn’t touch. After an hour or so, we agreed that we were hungry and wandered back down into the Square and over to Bailey’s, still there after all those years and looking just the same, except for its new banquettes and floor. My heart ached with all the past it held for me and the people I’d lost. I told Philo about the commune and Sandy and Bishop and Dolores, whom I hadn’t yet looked up. I left out why I left Pax. He didn’t ask and I didn’t say. I brought him up to date about Alyssa and Eve and Annette and Ted. And Mom. He was weepy about these friends, whom he’d lost when he and Mom split up. Philo was as nostalgic and romantic as I was, and together we indulged in an afternoon of sentiment.

  I touched his hand lightly a couple of times, and he did the same to me. Clearly it was up to me what happened next: he was giving me control. A surge of power lightninged through me, and my heart flew at the thought that finally Philo and I could be together.

  But nothing happened. Affectionate as I felt, I could not bring myself to move toward him and he did not move toward me. We had sandwiches and coffee and sat over second and third cups for hours, until both of us were twitchy. We sighed and looked at each other. We knew.

  So Philo signaled for the check and paid for my lunch, which was nice, since I was still broke, having left Pax with about fifteen dollars in my wallet. We stood up. I couldn’t believe I was letting him go—Philo, my dream lover. But I had to: it felt almost like he was my brother. Slowly, we walked outside and stood in the warm air for a few minutes, and I remembered that the last time I’d stood like this outside a restaurant I was with Steve outside Sonny’s, and Christopher was watching us. Philo and I clasped hands a final time, then he turned toward the T and I toward home.

  All the way walking home and even after I got there, I was sunk in feeling. I felt loved, which I hadn’t felt in quite a while. I don’t know why—did Stepan not love me? I had thought he did. Maybe I didn’t love him. Didn’t the Pax people love me? Wasn’t that the magic of commune living, being with a group of kindred souls connected by fellowship and good feeling? Where had the good feeling gone? When? How?

  But I also felt hollow. For years now I had let myself dream or fantasize or imagine, or do something more profound than dream, about living happily ever after with Philo. Letting him go felt like letting go of the hope of happily-ever-after, and I almost couldn’t bear it. My temptation was to brush it aside and not think about it, and I decided that was the right thing to do. Other people might make themselves stronger by facing things, but not me. I handled things by putting them in a cubby.

  Our fireplace was on a wall that projected a couple of feet into the living room; around the bend from it, set in the floor like a big mousehole, was a cubby with a door, a brick floor, and plaster-finished walls. It was meant to hold dough during bread making, to protect it from drafts. In its warm shelter, the dough would rise to its yeasty fullness. I thought I did best in life when I put things that hurt me or made me uncertain in the bread cubby of my soul and let them rise in their own time. I stopped thinking of myself as a coward and just went ahead and hid things, certain that they would rise when they were ready.

  The next day I went to Sonny’s to get a job. Sonny wasn’t surprised to see me; I was following a common female pattern. Women quit waitressing when they finish college or get a real job or marry or have a baby. But an awful lot of them come back, because things don’t pan out—few jobs pay women decent wages and women always have to work around their responsibilities to children and men. Waiting tables allows them to do that. At least, this was the way it was then, in the 1970s.

  I was just biding time. I had no idea what I would do when Mom left for France, but I would have to vacate the house on Kirkland Street. I thought vaguely of applying to UMass in Boston, not because I had a driving desire to learn—although I would have liked to take some poetry courses—but to pass time until I knew what I wanted to do. The thought drifted across my mind that I could maybe share an apartment somewhere with someone.

  I called Dolores but couldn’t find her. She had written me a couple of times at Pax, and I had intended to answer. But somehow we lost touch. The people presently at the halfway house didn’t know where she was now; the director knew that she’d lived there and had completed her BA. He thought she had gone to graduate school somewhere, but didn’t recall where. He hadn’t personally known her and no one from her time there was still there.

  I wondered if I’d ever see them again—Dolores, Sandy, Bishop, or Philo. Now I had to add the people at Pax. It felt as if my life had burned up, leaving no residue. But by the time June rolled around, a residue exploded across my calendar, changing everything for me.

  I discovered I was pregnant. I don’t know how it happened. Stepan had used condoms and I made him be careful, most of the time. But sometimes, he was broke and couldn’t afford to buy any, and sometimes, when we were out in the fields working we would get hot for each other and just do it. He hadn’t worn anything the last time, I recalled. It must have been that night I went to his room just before I left; or maybe it was that day when we fell in each others’ arms on a shady bank of grass near the pond: green deeds in a green shade. When he didn’t have a condom, he would withdraw before coming. He said that was what most men in Russia did, and that it worked dependably. I should never have believed him. It was mid-June before I realized I had missed my May period. I began to worry immediately, but in those days they gave you a really hard time when you wanted to find out if you were pregnant. You weren’t allowed to know. You would go to a drugstore and give the druggist your urine sample and ask for a rabbit test but the test didn’t work until you were two months on, and some druggists made you swear you were married before they’d give it to you. So you had to put a ring on your finger and reverse it, so it looked like a wedding ring, and lie. I didn’t find out I was pregnant until early July.

  Mom was beside herself. She kept cursing herself for agreeing to go to Lyon. She said she would cancel her trip, and if she couldn’t stop the man coming to live in our house, she’d rent another house for us to live in. She said she would help me, take care of me, do whatever necessary to see me through this. Unless, of course, she added, I wanted an abortion. She didn’t go further, but isolated as I had been, I did know that abortion had been legalized a few years before, and that there was a clinic in Cambridge. I didn’t know what to do.

  I had no desire to have a baby for Stepan, if that is ever a woman’s motivation. I’d often seen plays and movies in which a woman wants to have a baby for a man, but by that time I’d realized they were almost all written by men who knew nothing at all about real women. I had never met a woman who wanted a baby for a man. I suppose it’s possible, but I wasn’t one of them.

  What I had to decide was if I wanted a baby or not. My thinking on the subject consisted of pictures of me living with a baby. Since I couldn’t imagine how I was going to live at all, I could invent stories at will, and I did. I lay in bed, night after night, envisioning myself taking courses at some college, being supported by Mom and, somehow or other, taking care of this baby. It seemed a grim life, hard and unrewarding. And Mom would have to do most of the work, and how could she? Her job was demanding. Besides, it wasn’t fair: she’d already done her share of child rearing with me. This one was my turn.

  I pictured Stepan leaving Pax to get a job and support me. He’d be sulky and raging. I pictured Stepan and me living together in Boston or Cambridge. It wasn’t pretty. I did not and could not picture returning to Pax while Bert and Brad were there.

  I then tried to picture myself without a baby. I went back to school. I got some sort of job. I asked Sonny to hire me as a cook. But these
images all felt grim and empty too.

  Whatever stories I told myself about my future, I was scrupulously realistic in my daydreams. I never let anything imaginary happen that couldn’t happen in life or wasn’t likely to happen. As a result, my visions were tamer than life, because in real life, things that can’t happen, do—things you couldn’t have predicted, that weren’t probable. That was the most wonderful thing about life: magic was real.

  But an odd thing: once I’d pictured my possible lives with a baby, and removed it, I felt this aching loneliness, a hole in my soul. I knew it had been there at least since Daddy had left, and maybe before. Nothing had ever filled it, not any of my girl-friends, not the Andrews boys, not Christopher, not Stepan, and not even Philo. I had the suspicion that it was never going to be filled. Girls think it will be filled by a lover or husband; I don’t know what boys think—maybe they expect it to be filled by adventure or career. But I sensed that nothing would ever fill it for me—except for brief snatches of time, for example, when I was writing that paper on the Bible that thrilled me so much, or when I was cooking a great meal—like a baby would. It could only be filled by something I cared about more than my own life—and that could only be a child. I wondered if that was the reason older women often seemed content, and men not, and why so many men went from woman to woman all their lives. Maybe women who put a child in that space felt less empty, and maybe men didn’t know they could do that.

  But a woman could not fill that place for a man any more than a man could fill it for a woman. Children, not lovers, assuaged emptiness. I didn’t know if that was a good reason to have a child, or if I would be able to be a decent parent, despite all the resolutions I’d made as a teenager. But I couldn’t think of anything better to do right then.

  I let myself remember what I had lost by leaving Pax: my garden, cooking for the commune, and a sense of mattering to others. I didn’t miss writing poetry, because I could—and did—write wherever I was or whatever I was doing. I had written dozens of poems at Pax and a couple since I was back at Mom’s, including one I liked:

  Poppies

  I feel thin,

  thin as the skin

  of the poppies,

  rising on their thin

  and crooked spines

  as they step away

  from earth.

  The crepe paper

  Blossoms cup

  Their orange hands.

  Burnished till translucent,

  they reach up

  and open—

  as if begging

  for emptiness.

  I had been working on this for some time, adding “complete” to the last line, then removing it, changing the order of some words, and adding and removing spaces. I was working on another poem I had tentatively called “Anthurium,” but I wasn’t satisfied with it yet. When I was writing, it filled me completely, satisfied me; but I couldn’t write every day, I didn’t have the energy, the right kind of energy, didn’t have the drive. Writing poetry was something I did for pleasure, not for a living. I also cooked for pleasure but I did not get the same kind of satisfaction just cooking for myself or for Mom and me. To get fulfillment from cooking, I had to cook for a lot of people. Cooking was like playing the piano or singing; it was something you did for an audience. So I thought I could cook for a living.

  But I wouldn’t want to work as a chef for Sonny, because I didn’t want to cook the kind of food he served—hamburgers and French fries and chicken salad and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. He served canned soup. That would not satisfy me at all, especially now that I was home and could use bones to make broth and was busy making delicious potato leek soup, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, or chicken broth with egg drop noodles—the Lithuanian, not the Chinese, kind.

  So after a couple of weeks of waitressing, of being pregnant and knowing it, I called Dad.

  It made sense. I needed shelter and someone who cared at least a little about my well-being. He was alone. He had land I could cultivate. There were lots of restaurants in his area that I could persuade to give me a chance. And who knew? He might be happy to see me.

  He must have been a little sloshed when I called because he sounded as if he didn’t know who I was. I told him I’d left the commune and needed a place to live for a while. Was he still alone? If so, could I come and live with him? He was sarcastic, his tone conveying the message, “So you finally call the old man. What happened, your mother throw you out?” I said Mom was going to France for two years. High dudgeon: what kind of mother is she, going off to Europe and leaving her child alone? Not remembering that I was twenty-two years old and had been, until the month before, safely ensconced on a commune.

  I laughed. I said, “I’m a big girl now, Dad, but the thing is, I’m pregnant.”

  That stopped him.

  “Well, come, Jess, of course! Live here as long as you like, think of this as your house, you know how I am, I just eat and sleep here. You can live here and do what you like. It’ll be your house.”

  And so I went.

  Dad’s house looked unloved and uncared for. It was clean—his housekeeper, Mrs. Thacker, saw to that—but the straw flowers and pink bows looked dusty and tired. It looked like a house no one cared about. Houses can look that way, just like people—clean and neat, but abandoned. When Dad embraced me, he had tears in his eyes but he wasn’t drunk. I hadn’t seen him in three years, because he’d never visited Pax, although I’d invited him. I drove to his house in the car he’d bought me, which by now was getting old, and he said, “Time we got you some new wheels.”

  But I hadn’t come back here to be Daddy’s little girl. “When I can afford them, Dad. The car goes fine. I love it. It’s enough that you’re letting me live here. I really appreciate it.”

  “Hey, you’re my little girl. Mi casa es su casa. So how far along are you?” He surveyed my body, which of course showed nothing yet.

  “Not far. I figure the baby will arrive at the end of January or early February.”

  “And who’s the daddy?”

  “A guy called Stepan, who lives on the commune.”

  “And what is he going to do about it?” He spoke peremptorily, the outraged father of a wronged innocent.

  “He doesn’t even know about it.”

  My father opened his mouth to expostulate.

  I put up my hand like a traffic cop. “No, Dad.”

  He shut his mouth and stared at me.

  I shook my head. “Let it be.” I walked away from him to gaze out the big window facing the lake. “God, it’s beautiful here.”

  “You’re going to have this baby on your own?” he asked in a flat voice.

  “No.” I turned to face him. “With your help,” I said.

  His face changed; it grew softer and pinker, younger. “Well, that’s a new one! I guess I can do that. Although it’s really your mother’s job.”

  “She did it for me. You’ll do it for my child.”

  Did I imagine him puffing himself up? I walked over to the couch and sat down.

  He bent over me, but only said, “How about a drink? You drink these days?”

  “Not much. A little wine once in a while. But I’d love a Coke.”

  “Comin’ up.” He went into the kitchen, moving faster than usual. He came back with dark Canadian Club on the rocks and a Coke. He sat down across from me. And he smiled.

  I smiled back. “You miss Julie?”

  “Not really. She was a nice kid but a little tiresome. Silly. Something your mother never was. But much more agreeable than your mother.”

  “You won’t mind having me here? With a squalling baby?”

  “I won’t mind having you. About the baby I can’t say, haven’t laid eyes on a baby for—how old are you now?”

  “Twenty-two. I’ll be twenty-three next month.”

  “That long. But I don’t recall minding having you around twenty-two years ago.”

  “I really need your help.”

>   “I’m in a much better position to help you now than I was then—young, broke, inexperienced, didn’t know a goddamned thing . . . What do you need?”

  “Well, a home. I’ll get a job, so nothing else, except I’d like to plant some of your land.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. One of the meadows. I’ve been farming on the commune, raising vegetables and herbs. I’m good at it and I love it and you will love the organic food I grow . . .”

  “I’m not much for vegetables. You know, steak and a baked potato is my dish. What the hell is organic food?”

  “A few years ago, a few farmers began to experiment with growing things without chemicals. American farmers spray their crops with toxic chemicals to kill bugs and fend off certain diseases. Nowadays we have huge factory farms, and farming is business. So, those of us who don’t like this have decided to try the opposite.

  “We are trying to raise vegetables and fruits without using any of those methods. It’s called organic farming. It’s good for people and good for the land, and what’s more, things raised this way taste better than the other stuff.”

  “I haven’t had a decent tomato or peach since I was a boy,” my father grumbled.

  “Right. It’s kind of a movement. There are only a couple dozen farms in the whole country that do this kind of thing. But lots of people are talking about it. There’s a woman out in San Francisco, Alice Waters, who started a restaurant that’s become famous, Chez Panisse. Her meals are supposed to be luscious and she uses locally grown products. She urges what she calls sustainable agriculture. She’s my hero.”

  My father was gazing at me. “Good, Jess,” he said finally. “Very good. Of course you can have a meadow. Whichever one you want. There are three.”