“Now,” said her father, “I want to know about your life. The place you live. The woman you live with. Start there.”
“Ground floor of an old house in San Pablo. Two bedrooms, and a walk-in closet for Toddie’s room. Old Japanese couple have the upstairs. The neighborhood’s a little rough but there’s a lot of nice people, and our block is OK. OK? Then Marie. She’s gay, but we’re not living together. It’s actually Toddie she was interested in.”
“Jesus!”
“I mean, she wanted to help parent a baby.” Ann broke into a laugh that was both genuine and nervous. “She does computer programming and counselling, so she works at home a lot. It works out really well for care-sharing. The way it works out with her and me, we each have a wife.”
“Great,” Stephen said.
“I mean, you know, a person you can count on to sort of take over if you can’t. And do the shitwork, and you know.”
“Not my experience of wives,” her father said. “So you’ve given up on men, then.”
“No. Like I said, Marie and I aren’t together. She has lesbian friends, a lot of my friends are straight, but just now, I don’t know, I’m just not into that a whole lot. I will again, you know. It’s not like I’m bitter or anything. I wanted to have the baby. I just want to be with him mainly at this point. The job’s weird hours, but that means when I’m out Marie’s there, and mostly when he’s awake, I’m there. So it’s real good now. And later it’ll change. . . .”
As she spoke she felt in her father, sitting a foot or two from her, a physical resistance, a great impatience; she felt it physically as a high, hard, slanting blade, like the blade of a bulldozer. The owner of the land had the right to clear it, to clear out this underbrush of odd jobs, half-couplings, rented closets, hiding places, makeshifts. The blade advanced.
“Since Penny and I divorced I’ve done a lot of stock-taking. Sitting right here. Or riding Dolly over there around the ranch.” Her father was looking across the pond at the high hill as he spoke, watching the grazing mare and colt and the white gelding. “Thinking about both my marriages. Especially about the first one, strangely enough. I began to see that I didn’t ever work through the whole thing before I married Penny. I never really handled the pain your mother caused me. I denied it. Macho, tough guy—real men don’t feel pain. You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you’ve done is save your shit to drown in. So I’ve been doing the work I should have done ten, twelve years ago. And some of it’s almost too late. I have to face the fact that I wasted a lot of those years, wasted a marriage. Started it and ended it in all the unfinished business from the first marriage. Well, OK. Win one, lose one. What I’m doing now is establishing priorities. What’s important. What comes first. And doing that, I’ve been able to see what my mistake, my one real mistake, was. You know what it was?”
He looked at her so keenly with his clear, light-blue eyes that she flinched. He waited, smiling slightly, alert.
“Divorcing Mama, I guess,” she said, looking down and swallowing the words because she knew they were wrong. He did not speak, and she looked back at him. He was still smiling, and she thought what a handsome man he was, looking like a Roman general now with his short-cropped hair and silver-blue eyes, long lips and eagle nose, but wearing a Plains Indian beaded talisman on a rawhide cord about his neck. He was very deeply tanned. On his ranch in summer he wore nothing but shorts and thong sandals, or went naked.
“That was no mistake,” he said. “That was one of the right things I did. And buying this place. I had to move on. And Ella isn’t willing, isn’t able to go on, to act, move, develop. Her strength is in staying put. God, what strength! But it’s all in that. So the shit piles up around her, and she never clears it away. Hell, she builds walls of it! Fecal fortifications. Defending her from, God forbid, change. From, God forbid, freedom . . . I had to break out of her fortress. I was suffocating. Buried alive. I tried to take her with me. She wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t move. Ella never had any use for freedom, her own or anybody else’s. And I was so desperate for it by then that I’d take it on any terms. So that’s where I made my mistake.”
She felt remiss at still not understanding what his mistake had been, but he said nothing, and she was obliged to admit it: “I guess I don’t know what mistake,” she said, feeling as she said it that it must have something to do with her, and oppressed by the feeling. She glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping baby.
“Leaving you,” her father said quietly. “Not putting up a fight for custody.”
She knew that this was very important to him and ought to be so to her, but all she felt was that she was being crowded, pushed along by the slanting, uprooting blade, and she looked back again at the baby and moved the shirttail unnecessarily to shade his legs.
“A little late to think about that, she thinks,” her father’s voice said gently.
“Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow we got to see each other every summer,” she said, blushing red.
The blade moved forward, levelling and making clear. “I needed freedom in order to go on living, and I saw you as part of the jail. Part of Ella. I literally didn’t separate you from her—you see? She didn’t allow that possibility even as an idea. You were her, you were her motherhood, and she was the Great Mother. She had you built right into the walls. And I bought that. Maybe if you’d been a boy I’d have seen what was going on sooner. I’d have felt my part in you, my claim—my right to get you out of the shitfort, the earthworks. My right to assert your right to freedom. You see? But I didn’t see it. I didn’t look. I just got loose and left you as hostage. It’s taken me twelve years to be able to admit that. I want you to know that I do admit it now.”
Ann picked a foxtail from the corner of the baby’s blanket by her hip. “Yeah, well,” she said. “I guess it worked out OK, anyhow, you know, Mom and me, and anyhow Penny didn’t want some teen-age stepdaughter around all the time.”
“If I’d fought for you and won custody—and if I’d fought I’d have won—what Penny wanted or didn’t want would have been a matter of supreme indifference. I probably wouldn’t have married her. One mistake leads to the next one. You’d have lived here. All your summers here. Gone to a good school. And a four-year college, maybe an Eastern school, Smith or Vassar. And you wouldn’t be living with a lesbian in San Pablo, working nights for a phone company. I’m not blaming you, I’m blaming myself. I can’t believe how true to form Ella is, how unchangingly unchanging—how she dug you in, walled you into the same dirt, the same futureless trap. What kind of future does your life spell for your kid, Ann?”
But I was really lucky to get the job, Ann thought, but what’s neat is that for a while things aren’t changing all the time, but you haven’t even seen Mom for ten years so how do you know? All these thoughts were mere shadows and underbrush, among which her mind hopped like a rabbit.
“Well,” she said, “things are really OK the way they worked out,” and, unable to control her increasing anxiety about Toddie, she turned away from her father and knelt above the sleeping baby, pretending that he had waked up. “All right then! Up you come! Hey baby bunny boy. Hey you sleepy bunny.” The baby’s head wobbled, his eyes looked in different directions, and as soon as she settled him on her lap he fell fast asleep again. His small, warm, neat weight gave her substance. She stirred the lake with her toes and said, “You shouldn’t worry about it, Daddy. I’m really happy. I just wish you were, if you aren’t.”
“You’re happy,” he said, with one glance of his light eyes, the almost scornfully accurate touch she remembered, that reversed the poles.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “But there’s one thing I wanted to tell you about.”
While she summoned up words, Stephen said, with satisfaction in his acuteness, “I thought so. The father’s back in the picture.”
“No,” Ann said vaguely, not heeding. “Well, see, they think at the clinic that Toddie had some brain damage, probably at birth. That’s why he’s slow developing in some ways. We noticed it pretty soon. They can’t tell how much yet, and they think it isn’t real severe. But they know there’s some impairment.” She drew her fingertip very lightly around the tiny pink curve of the baby’s ear. “So. That’s taken some, you know, thinking. Getting used to. It’s not as big a deal as I thought. But it is, in some ways.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“There isn’t anything to do. Now. Sort of wait and see. And watch. He’s only five months. They noticed a—”
“What are you doing about correcting it?”
“There isn’t anything like that to do.”
“You’re just going to take this?”
She was silent.
“Ann, this is my grandson.”
She nodded.
“Don’t cut me out. You may be angry at the father, but don’t take it out on men, don’t join the castraters, for God’s sake! Let me help. Let me get some competent doctors, let’s get some light on this. Don’t dig down into a hole with all these fears and old wives’ tales, and smother the kid with them. I don’t accept this. Not on the word of some midwife at this women’s clinic that botched the kid’s birth! My God, Ann! You can’t take this out on him! There are things that can be done!”
“I’ve taken him to Permanente,” Ann said.
“Shit! Permanente! You need first-class doctors, specialists, neurologists—Bill can give us some recommendations. I’ll get onto it when we go back to the house. I’ll call him. My God. This is what I meant! This is it. This is what I left you in—the mud—My God! how could you sit here all day with him and me and not tell me?”
“It isn’t your fault, Daddy.”
“Yes,” he said, “it is. Exactly. If I—”
She interrupted. “It’s the way he is. And there’s a best way for him to be, like anybody. And that’s what we can do, is find that. So please don’t talk shit about ‘correcting.’ Look, I’d like to have a swim now, I think. Will you hold him?”
She saw that he was startled, even frightened, but he said nothing. She carefully transferred the rosy, sweaty, silky baby onto his thin thighs covered with sparse sun-bleached hairs. She saw his large, fine hand cup the small head. She got up then and went three steps to the end of the little dock and stood on the weather-gnawed grey planks. The water was shallow, and she did not dive but splashed down in, her feet tangling for a moment in slimy weeds. She swam. Ten or fifteen yards out she turned, floated awhile, trod water to look back at the dock. Stephen sat motionless in the flood of sunlight, his head bowed over the baby, whom she could not even see in the shadow of her father’s body.
THE PHOTOGRAPH
As she was scrubbing out the kitchen sink, where she had let bleaching powder stand to whiten the old rust stains, Ella saw that the girl from the complex was talking with Stephen. She rinsed out the sink, got her dark glasses from the kitchen oddments drawer, polished them a bit with the dishtowel, put them on, and went out into the back yard.
Stephen was weeding the vegetable plot by the fence, and the girl was standing on the other side of the fence, just her head and shoulders showing. She had her baby in one of those kangaroo things that mashed it up against its mother’s front. It was asleep, nothing visible but the tiny sleek head like a kitten’s back. Stephen was working, his head bent down as usual, and didn’t seem to be paying attention to the girl, but just as she came out, before the screen door banged, Ella heard him say, “Green beans.”
The girl looked up and said, “Oh, hi, Mrs. Hoby!” in a bright voice. Stephen kept his head bent down at his weeding.
Ella came over to the laundry roundabout and felt the clothes she had hung out earlier in the afternoon. Stephen’s T-shirts and her yellow wash dress were dry already, but Stephen’s jeans were still damp, as she had expected; feeling them was nothing but an excuse for coming out.
“You sure have a nice garden,” the girl said.
The complex of eight apartments they had built next door ten years ago had nothing but cement and garages behind it where the Pannis’s garden with the big jacaranda had been. There was no place for a child to play there. But before the baby was old enough the girl would have moved on, the welfare-and-food-stamp people never stayed, the men with no jobs and the girls with no husbands, playing their big radio-tape machines loud and smoking dope at night in those hot little apartments.
“Stephen and I know each other from the store,” the girl said. “He carried my groceries home for me last week. That was a nice thing to do. I had the baby, and my arms were just about falling off.”
Stephen laughed his “huh-huh,” not looking up.
“Have you lived here for a long time?” the girl asked. Ella was rehanging the jeans, for something to do. She answered after she had got the seams matched. “My brother has lived here all his life. This is his house.”
“It is? That’s neat,” the girl said. “All his life? That’s amazing! How old are you, Stephen?”
Ella thought he would not answer, and it might serve the girl right, but after a considerable pause he said, “Four. Forty-four.”
“Forty-four years right here? That’s wonderful. It’s a nice house, too.”
“It was,” Ella said. “It was all single-family houses when we were children here.” She spoke dryly, but she had to admit that the girl did not mean to patronise, and was pleasant, the way she talked right to Stephen instead of across him the way most people did, or else they shouted at him as if he were deaf, which he was only slightly, in the right ear.
Stephen stood up, dusted off his knees carefully, and went across the grass and into the house, hooking the screen door shut behind him with his foot.
Ella had sat down on the small cement base of the laundry round-about to pull at a dandelion clump in the grass. It had been there for years, always coming back. You had to get every single piece of root of a dandelion, and the roots went under the cement.
“Did I hurt his feelings?” the girl asked, shifting the baby in its carrier.
“No,” Ella said. “He’s probably getting a photograph to show you. Of the house.”
“I really like him,” the girl said. Her voice was low and a little husky, with a break in it, like some children’s voices. What they used to call a whiskey voice, only childlike. The poor thing was not much more than a child. Babies having babies, they had said on the television.
“Have you always lived here too, Mrs. Hoby?”
Ella worked at the dandelion root, loosening it, then took off her sun glasses and looked round at the girl. “My husband and I ran a resort hotel,” she said. “Up in the redwood country, on a river. A very old place, built in the eighteen eighties, quite well known. We owned it for twenty-seven years. When my husband passed away I ran it for two more years. Then when my mother passed away and left the house to Stephen, I decided to retire and come live here with him. He has never lived with strangers. He’s fifty-four, not forty-four. Numbers confuse him sometimes.”
The girl listened intently. “Did you have to sell the resort? Do you still own it?”
“I sold it,” Ella said.
“What was it like?”
“A big country hotel, up north. Twenty-six rooms. High ceilings. A terraced dining room over the river. We had to modernise the kitchens and the plumbing entirely when we bought it. There used to be places like that. Elegant. Before the motels. People came for a week, or a month. Some people, families and single people, came every summer or fall for years. They made their reservation for the next year before they left. We offered fishing, good trout fishing, and horseback riding, and mountain walks. It was called The Old River Inn. It’s mentioned in several b
ooks. The present owners call it a ‘bed and breakfast.’” Ella dug her fingers in under the dandelion root, sinewy there in its dirt darkness, and pried. It broke. She should have got the weeder or the garden fork.
“What an amazing kind of thing to do,” the girl said, “running a place like that.” Ella could have told her that they had never had a vacation themselves for a quarter of a century and that the hotel had worn her out and finally killed Bill and eaten up their lives for nothing, mortgaged and remortgaged and the payments from the bed and breakfast people not even enough to live on here, but because there was a break or a catch in the girl’s voice that sounded as if she saw the forest ridges and the Inn on its lawns above the river as Ella saw it, as the old, noble, beautiful, remote thing, she said only, “It was hard work,” but smiled a little as she said it.
Stephen came out of the house and straight across the grass, glancing up once at the girl and then down again at the picture he held. It was the framed photograph of Mama and Papa on the porch of the house, the year they bought it, and Ella in her pinafore dress sitting on the top front step, and Baby Stephen sitting in the pram. The girl took it and looked at it for quite a time.
The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth Page 31
