by Karen Raney
“Are you taking his side?”
Considering me for a moment, she said mildly, “Well, since you can’t talk to Maddy, at least you’d get his point of view.”
Beyond Norma’s roped-off dock the open water resembled wet stone. I was warming to her idea. Something had me in its grip, and what it promised was far more primitive and gratifying than knowledge, or the mirage of closure.
“You know, I think you’re right,” I said slowly. “I might just do that. Put him in the picture.”
18
Back home, I reread the first few letters as dispassionately as I could and scanned the rest, saving them for when I was stronger. It was not easy to hear Maddy’s voice on the page, her schoolgirl exclamations, her wise-wistfulness seeking to gain favor, love even, from someone who did not know she was dying. Wow . . . I could not believe my eyes! It feels so strange to be writing to you. I wonder whether I have made you up! Each page had one email printed on it, with date and time information at the top. Some were only a line or two long. They were in exact sequence. Maddy may have been an indifferent housekeeper, but she had inherited her grandfather’s passion for documentation and order. That, or else the messages were of such crowning importance that each had to be given its own page, pampered with white space, meticulously filed, read over and over and stored in their slot by the bed to keep them close to her and safe from me for as long as she was around.
Nor was it easy to hear Antonio’s voice on the page. You will discover your own ideas as you grow older . . . I am maybe finding out how different girls are . . . A lot of things in life happen without you intending them . . . The even spacing and nonnative order of his words, his lightly rolled r’s and soft b’s were like a lullaby gone bad, working the spell not of comfort but of loss. Reading Antonio’s emails, I was the young woman besotted with his gentle lecturing, his humor, the natural authority and charm radiated by speakers of other languages. I was the one who wanted Antonio and Antonio only to be the father of my children, and I was the one consumed with red-hot fury at him for forsaking us. He had entered Maddy’s life just as she was leaving it. Whereas I like my own company! Yes, Antonio. You always were sold on your own company.
An ambush outside his office. Follow him home. Spring myself on a family dinner. I indulged in such scenarios for several days, perfectly aware that they would never take place. It was not my style. Another idea, however, was forming. I spent a week composing an email, rewrote it, left it to simmer in drafts. Finally I clicked it on its way in the spectral manner of electronic messages, thinking this was all wrong, that such a letter should generate hideous grinding, scraping, crashing noises.
Dear Antonio,
Remember me? I recently found out that you and Maddy have been in contact. I think it was a bid for independence that led her to keep this from me. Suffice it to say, she has always had her own mind and of course I am proud of that.
At first I was annoyed at what seemed like underhandedness on your part. It is natural for a sixteen-year-old to want to keep secrets, but it is harder to understand an adult going along with that under the circumstances. I can’t help thinking if you had really wanted me to know you were communicating with my daughter, you would have found a way to tell me. But then I guess you have gone all these years without choosing to contact me, so maybe it’s not so surprising. I’m sure you have your reasons.
I am not sorry Maddy found you. I would never deprive her of something that is her birthright. She needed to fill in the missing pieces of her heritage, if that is the right word. I’m glad you saw fit to respond to her in such a friendly way.
I am writing to see whether it would be a good time for you and me to meet and talk. To state the obvious, regardless of how it ended between us, we will always be connected through Maddy.
I work for the Bryce Collection in DC. I may be going to London soon on business. I know you have a family. I would not want to upset them. I want to talk to you, that’s all. I will leave it up to you how we could best do that.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Eve
My letter was, in the end, longer and more formal than I intended. When I read it over I thought I came across as uptight. Had I been uptight back then? Antonio would not remember me that way. Maybe if he met me now, he would think I had grown up. Or maybe—I steeled myself against the thought—uptightness had, in his eyes, been one of my crimes. Anyway, I hoped I had pitched it right: frank without giving too much away, candid enough to hint at grievance, friendly enough not to scare him off. At the last minute I replaced bothering to contact me with choosing to contact me. The fact that Antonio had been willing to enter into such a warm exchange with Maddy gave me hope that he would agree to see me. I didn’t know what I would do if he turned me down or did not respond.
I tried to put it out of my mind. My laptop beckoned and repelled me at the same time. Ten days later I was checking a work email and there was his name in my in-box, his message having arrived as stealthily as mine had departed.
Dear Eve,
I can’t tell you the number of times I thought of writing to you after I left the U.S. Well I don’t know the number . . . Believe me, it is a high number!
Imagine my shock when Maddy wrote to me. We emailed back and forth for a few months. She stopped writing quite suddenly in September. I guess some doubts must have got to her. Of course I respected her wishes and did not push her to change her mind or explain. I really hope I did not offend her in any way. Maybe the situation was too much for her, especially doing it on her own. Maybe when she is older she will want to talk to me again and, who knows, maybe meet each other someday. I have to be honest and say that it was an amazing thing getting to know Maddy, even that short time. I guess it is not every day you find out you have a child you didn’t know you had. And Maddy is such a charming and interesting person. Congratulations, Eve, for raising her like that. Really, I mean it.
I’m not sure why Maddy was so against telling you she was writing to me. Believe me I did try to persuade her. I can hear you are somehow angry. I apologize. For my part, my wish is that you would have found a way to tell me of Maddy’s existence.
If you are coming to London of course we must meet. Has Maddy told you something about me? I am a researcher and lecturer at University College London. I have two boys, 6 and 8 years. Erica, my wife, does not have any idea about this part of my past or even the slightest idea that I might have another child somewhere. Even I never thought this. Which is why it is a strange dream for me. I will think how we should best meet. We can keep in contact by email if that is okay with you. Thank you for writing.
Antonio
I read Antonio’s letter with an absurdly racing heart. By the time I reached the end I was weak with disbelief. Imagine my shock . . . a strange dream for me . . . How awful for you, Antonio! Who would have guessed that pregnancy leads to the birth of a child!
I nursed my fury, laced though it was with compassion as the rhythm of the words called up the Antonio I had once loved. I countered these flashes with the memory of his robotic voice, his locked-up eyes that gave nothing away, allowed nothing in, until the final bitter knowledge: “You don’t want to have one with me.” What it had cost me to walk out of his apartment, and what it had cost me in the ensuing years going it alone! Only a saint would have returned his call the next day; only a martyr would have fed his need to justify himself and be forgiven. I could not have borne a minute more, just as I could not bear the spin he was putting on it now. My wish is that you would have found a way to tell me of Maddy’s existence.
Antonio, the wronged party! Antonio would have liked an annual report on the child he abandoned! If something in the tone of his letter troubled me, I thrust it out of my mind. The idea of meeting him began to work on me from inside, twisting out of shape every other relationship in my life.
19
My father crouched in the hallway, snapping the leash onto Barney’s collar. His hair was comp
letely white over the pink of his skull and still held the ridges of the comb. I moved toward the door. I did not like looking down on my father’s head. It was Sunday afternoon, and the annual Blessing of the Animals was taking place at the National Cathedral. When my brother and I were small, we’d gone on a yearly pilgrimage to this conference of creatures. I had taken Maddy as well, though not consistently and not for many years. I proposed to my father that we go for our walk there while Rose was at her monthly book group.
“They had an iguana last year,” he said, heaving himself upright and ignoring my offer of a steadying hand. “What’ll it be next, stick insects?” He bent over again to retrieve something from the floor. “Vultures!”
“Oh, they can’t allow birds of prey.”
The leaflets hit the wastebasket. “We have buyers for you! We want your house!” I’d been a baby when my parents moved into what was at the time a run-down neighborhood near Dupont Circle. During the middle-class flight to the suburbs they had stayed put. My father taught high school social studies, my mother mostly fourth grade; ten-year-olds were her limit, she said. When the middle class returned, it was only a matter of time before there were sidewalk cafés and a farmers’ market. Burned out twice in the riots, Fourteenth Street was now a boomtown for condos and restaurants; overnight a laundry had been turned into a Belgian brasserie, its ceilings installed prestained with cigarette smoke. Rose and Walter’s house remained largely unchanged: the same unadorned brick, stout black door and arched portico, whose lining, I noticed as I followed my father down the steps onto Corcoran Street, had started to crumble.
Three doors down, workers were hosing the hostas of the house with the face on it. The green man was the work of a hammered-metal artist and had been there for as long as I could remember, inserted in the recess of a small window. Smile half hidden in his beard, he gazed knowingly down at us as we passed. For young Maddy, the face had been a source of awe. She never went by without stopping, hands behind her small back, to face him. “He’s mad at me, Mom.” “He’s so sad today. He wants to come down from there.” “Does he ever go indoors?” “Does he know what I’m thinking?”
We put Barney in the car, parked behind the elementary school in whose playground Maddy, aged six, had fallen off the jungle gym and broken her arm, and drove up Connecticut to Tenleytown.
“It’s a long walk from here,” I pointed out. We could have parked further on, but my father said why take the dog for a walk if we’re not going to walk? He stopped frequently on the long incline up Mount St. Alban to catch his breath. I did not like to hear my father’s labored breathing. I stopped whenever he did, pretending to admire the view, and took the leash from him, although Barney’s impatient straining was no doubt a help on the hill.
The steps of the church and the courtyard swarmed with animal life. Twin black terriers, white and pink puppies, golden puppies, brown puppies, beagles, mongrels, retrievers like Barney, and cats, mundane and exotic, sat in strollers and quivered on leashes. There were monarch butterflies, frogs and salamanders in glass boxes in their owners’ arms, and crates bearing pets we could not identify from where we stood. The white-robed ministers were all women. They dipped their sprigs into bowls of holy water to bless the animals with beatific smiles: long life and good health to all. Choral music poured from the cathedral face, piercing to the part of myself where spiritual yearning was stored.
“Dad?”
He was righting Barney’s ear. “Going on fourteen and you wouldn’t be caught dead in a stroller, would you, old man?”
“Dad.”
He straightened up and gave me his attention.
“I wanted to talk to you about something I found in Maddy’s room.”
“What’s that?”
I pulled a manila envelope from my bag and removed Maddy’s first letter to Antonio. I had only brought one. It was the fact rather than the content of the exchange that mattered. I handed it to my father without a word. Dear Antonio Jorge Romero, You don’t know me . . .
I waited while he read it through, tapping the paper from underneath with his finger. “And he wrote back?”
“About thirty times.” He looked at me then, trying his best not to smile. I had planned to be direct and unemotional, but my voice trembled with accusation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
My father’s silence was maddening. He never rushed into anything. “We were in the park one day,” he said at last. “She brought it up. She thought her father rejecting her had something to do with her getting cancer.”
“How could she think that?”
“It wasn’t logical. She had this idea about the universe not wanting her. I was glad she could say it out loud.”
“Well, it’s upset me.” I blinked hard. “As you can see.”
He didn’t move or come to my aid. “It’s understandable, isn’t it? She had to find him before it was too late. I helped her out a little, that’s all.” The implication was clear: I had not helped Maddy look for her father, had I?
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
I had seen my father’s face deformed by hilarity and by grief, but seldom by guilt. After a moment, in his reasonable voice, he said: “Don’t you think you had enough to face? We were so worried about you, Eve.” He let me pluck the letter out of his hand. His voice was hoarse. “We still are.”
I waved the paper at him. “Did it never occur to you I would want to know about something like this? How terrible it would be to find out later?”
His eyes traveled up and down the façade of what Maddy used to call “that big, sharp church,” resting on the rose window set deep between the towers. “I guess,” he said at last, “it was something she had to do on her own.”
I kept my silence, willing the animals to be gone. I could not bear so much soft, creaturely life in one place. No water could wash that away.
Eventually my father said: “She didn’t tell you?”
“Obviously she didn’t tell me! Did Mom know?”
“Of course not. If I’d told your mother, I’d have told you.”
“It was just between you and Maddy.”
He nodded. “She never showed me the letters. As things got worse, it wasn’t exactly at the front of my mind.”
A clergywoman approached; her smile faltered when she caught sight of our faces. That was when my father tried his one-armed sideways hug on me. The woman took it as her cue to flick her holy water on Barney, and as she did so, I slipped out of my father’s embrace and stood apart on my own patch of sunlit stone. I was not beholden to my parents anymore. I no longer had to bide my time or hold my tongue because I needed them for Maddy.
“Shall we go?”
My father plunged his hands in his pockets and bounced his change. “What was he like? Was he kind to her?”
“Kind enough.”
“Oh good! It meant a lot to Maddy, the idea of Antonio. I warned her he might not want anything to do with her. She was very determined. She was annoyed because I never told her I met him, way back when.”
“Well, Maddy was nothing if not determined. We all know that.”
Still my father did not move. “So,” he ventured, “it was a good thing she found him?”
“How would I know!”
He blinked at me in surprise. His eyes were wet.
“Probably,” I rushed to say. “Probably it was.”
When I stayed home from school as a child, I waited all day long for my father’s step in the hallway. Until he spoke to me and laid his hand on my forehead, my malaise was not wholly real or authorized.
I took his arm and scolded him. “You should have told me!”
He did not yield to my touch or my lighter tone. “Don’t you think,” he said at last, “it was up to Maddy to tell you?”
Outside the Metro, I handed my father the leash. I was taking the train north to Takoma Park.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right, Dad? Want me to come with you?”
He dis
missed the idea with a flap of his hand and bent over to pry a paper cup from Barney’s jaws. He tossed it at the trash can, missed, tossed again, and then he stood very straight, looking up and down the street, smiling the composed smile of someone whose life was mostly behind him. Joggers pounded past, their faces tense and faraway. Was it possible that my parents had made a recovery of sorts? After all, she wasn’t their child.
“Did you know,” he said, “they’ve started piping classical music into the Metro stations?”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“To discourage gangs from congregating.” It was the kind of story my father thrived on.
“Does it work?”
“Of course not. We’ll just end up with a generation of highly cultured youth!”
He offered his face for me to kiss, flooding me with remorse. He had supported me without question in single motherhood. He had come to Maddy’s aid and guarded her secrets. I may not have given Maddy a father, but I had given her a grandfather, and their relationship had been closer and more open than mine with him would ever be. He would never get over it. He would never be the same.
I waited for him to lay his hand on my head. Instead he gripped my upper arm and released it, his other signature gesture of affection, and set off down the sidewalk after Barney, taking with him the larger part of what he felt about Maddy and about me. Half a block away, he waggled the fingers of one hand behind his back. He knew I would be watching.
Maddy
20
It was true, if a little misleading, to say Jack was helping me with the animation. Depends on what you mean by help. He took the pictures of Serenity, he found some images of cities and forests, he supplied the camera, the copy stand, and the moral support. But the drawings were all mine, the ideas were mine, the head was mine. I made the decisions about how the images changed one into another. So I would say I was the artist and Jack was my assistant.
Once I got started, all I wanted was to be alone in my room. I had the copy stand on my desk with Jack’s camera aimed down at the paper taped to the base. The drawings and photographs I was working from were pinned to my bulletin board. With Cloud on the bed for company, and my mother out of sight but close by, I could continue for sometimes an hour at a time before I had to lie down. The days I was too exhausted to work, I lay in bed and tried running sequences through my mind, imagining the changes I would make. That didn’t get me anywhere. With drawing, the point is to see what you’re thinking.
