“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, looking finally, appropriately pained.
“I should have. More than anyone else, I should have told you, because it changed things for us, and you had no idea why. I’m sure you were telling me you wanted kids, but I pretended not to know. I couldn’t… I didn’t think I could go back there. I’m so sorry.”
“But… why couldn’t we? You were, what, twenty-one when we got together? It’s not exactly past childbearing age.”
“No, no.” She shook her head. This was the part he wouldn’t understand, she thought, and she took a moment to say it as well as she could. “It’s… that was my child. When I couldn’t even do that, I couldn’t get near it again. I just wanted to get as far away from it as I could. And you had Cressida, and that was such a terrible thing for you.…”
He looked alarmed. “I love Cressida. I’ve never regretted having her.”
“No, of course. But I always thought, Well, he already has a child.…”
Mark stirred his tea but didn’t drink it. “I should have insisted we talk it through. I should never have let it go.”
They sat in charged silence. Portia looked at her hands.
“Who was the father?” he said quietly.
“Tom Standley. My boyfriend in college.”
Mark nodded. “You’ve mentioned him.”
“I never told him. It was very wrong of me.”
He didn’t disagree with her. “I’m surprised your mother didn’t commandeer the entire situation.”
“She didn’t know. I didn’t tell her, either. I didn’t tell anyone, Mark. It took me all these years to tell you.”
He stared at her. It seemed to be finally sinking in. “Portia,” he said, shaking his head. “This must have been so hard for you.”
She was crying again, not in a violent way, but steadily, like a pipe that couldn’t be twisted entirely closed. It made her think of that character in the Iliad, with the wound that wouldn’t heal. The stench of it was so unbearable that his compatriots—supposedly his friends—had left him alone on an island. What tormented her most, she thought, was how many things would have been more or less the same if she had indeed told her mother, who would indeed have commandeered the situation. Portia could have finished school, taken her job at the Admissions Office, met Mark, moved to Princeton… everything the same but everything better. And now she would have a seventeen-year-old son.
“The strange thing is,” she said, “that I kept waiting to feel better about it. I knew it would be hard at the beginning, but I thought, you know, in time I’d feel better. Even a tiny bit better, even very gradually. But it never happened. I think it went the other direction, actually. I had to work harder and harder just to not think about what I’d done. And the baby, of course. And I live in this world of seventeen-year-old kids, you know? Every year, they’re always seventeen years old. And then one year he was seventeen, too. It just… it made it very hard.”
“Yes,” Mark said. “Losing a child is the hardest thing.”
“But what happened to you is different. Everyone who knows what happened to you feels compassion for you. I feel compassion for you. She was taken from you against your will. If you’d had a child who died, there would have been compassion, of course. But there’s no compassion for a mother who gives up her child. We’re on our own. We can’t even feel compassion for ourselves.”
She was, by the end of this, speaking through her hands. Her fingers smelled faintly of bleach from the laundry. Her voice came in jolts, every word produced only with effort. All this time, she realized, she had thought vaguely of the two of them as equally pained. Now she understood that she had been jealous for years: Poor Mark, deprived of his child by her lunatic mother, prevented from being the father he was born to be.
“I’ve wronged a lot of people,” she said, as if she were just now reviewing the lists. “But mostly you.”
“Well, I doubt that,” he told her. “But I accept the apology. I only wish you’d felt you could share it with me.”
“You had enough on your plate.” Portia sighed. “The whole Cressida situation was just tearing you up.”
He smiled suddenly. “Cressida is coming to spend her gap year with me. Marcie is beside herself. She applied to Newnham for law but didn’t get a place. I’m hoping, if she likes it here, maybe she’ll want to stay for university in the States.”
Portia nodded. “That would be nice.”
“Maybe you’d help her with her applications,” Mark said, suddenly a tiny bit shy.
She laughed. “I’d be glad to. If I’m still here.”
Mark looked at her sharply. “You’re leaving Princeton?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is it work? Or”—he gestured vaguely at the kitchen—“this?”
“I don’t know. Neither. Or both. It’s just something I’m thinking about.” Portia got up and went to the sink. She splashed water on her face and dried it off. She noted that she was no longer crying. “I suppose I’ll need to get out of this house, at any rate.”
He looked astonished. “Well, we ought to come to some kind of agreement,” he said carefully. “You’ve been getting our letters, of course.”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry. I haven’t read them. I’ll listen now if you want to make a proposal.”
Mark ran a hand through his graying hair. The ring caught the overhead light and winked gold. He seemed to be thinking something through, and it occurred to Portia that the proposal he was now assembling might not be the same one as in his attorney’s letters.
They talked until late, and through another pot of PG Tips. After the first hour, she went to find a legal pad, and they made the necessary decisions.
“How’s Helen?” she asked as he was getting ready to leave. She felt quite brave, saying this.
“Okay. Very crabby, actually. She’s on bed rest.”
“Oh?”
“Preterm labor. She had lofty goals of finishing her Woolf book, but she can’t concentrate. So she’s ended up watching a gruesome amount of daytime television, which sends her blood pressure shooting up and makes the whole situation worse.” He smiled at this. To her own surprise, Portia smiled, too.
“You’re going to be all right,” he told her, picking up his 1820 Prometheus Unbound, which Portia had retrieved for him from upstairs. “I’m not sure how I know that, but I know it.”
“Thanks,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “I actually think so, too.”
“And we’ll… I mean, I would like for us to still… you know, be in touch. Be friends.”
For the first time that evening, she lied to him. “Of course.”
He looked relieved.
“I really am glad about Cressida,” Portia said.
“Yes.” Mark shook his head. “But you know, you always told me it would work out eventually. You said if I waited long enough, she would come to me. Remember?”
“I said that?” said Portia, stunned.
“You did. You said it for years. And you see, it was true.” He reached out and pulled her against him, a tight but thoroughly unromantic hug. She could smell the old-book smell of the Shelley close to her cheek. “Maybe yours will, too,” he said quietly.
“Maybe,” she said. But that was a lie as well.
“Do you know what it means to leave a thing unfinished?” This is the question pondered by the title character of my favorite novel, MY NAME IS ASHER LEV. Like Lev, I have given much thought to this question, which is at once a universal question and, I believe, an inherently Jewish one. For Jews, after all, the world is broken, and hence imperfect. Part of our mission as human beings who love and believe in our G-d is to act in accordance with tikkun ha-olam, to repair and restore the broken world with goodness and decency. This should be the mission of every life, Jewish or not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A SENSE OF BEING DRAWN IN
As far as Greenfield, Massachusetts, she had n
o real intention of making the detour, but there was something about the Vermont border, drawing closer, that got her thinking. She wasn’t in a hurry, now. She had taken a calm, measured leave, signing papers in an impersonal legal office on Alexander Road, depositing the check they gave her (drawn, it pained her to note, on the joint account of Mark Telford and Helen Garrett) in a new account of her own. In the end, she had been the one to relinquish the house, taking away her things, finally pulling out of the drive in her overstuffed Toyota. She had allowed herself to be feted by her colleagues at a dinner in Lahiere’s, to which even Corinne had come, and even Clarence, though he was very careful, very, very careful, to be vague in his good wishes. As far as she could tell, the stated reason for her departure—that she had decided to return to New England, spend quality time with her mother, and help care for a newborn who had, somewhat mysteriously, joined the household—was not being challenged. Clarence, it seemed, had indeed contained the truth.
vermont welcome center, read the sign just past the border. Portia knew exactly what was in there: maple syrup, cheese, photographs of cows, cows, cows. Get used to it, she thought, suppressing a smile. It amazed her to be back, and not just visiting. Susannah was amazed about it, too, but she was also overwhelmed, caring for Alice and caring for Caitlin, who was also caring for Alice. Only a month earlier, Frieda had made good on her promise to move out, and Portia’s mother wasn’t going to decline the help.
There wasn’t, quite, a plan, only a semiprecise intention for the future, which included Caitlin commuting to Hanover and Susannah and Portia taking care of the baby. Susannah hadn’t really engaged with the longer implications of this, but Portia certainly had: Caitlin, she was sure, might be happy to share the care of her child, share even Alice’s affections—but she would not give her up. And, of course, she should not give her up. She was going to graduate with a Dartmouth degree and a four-year-old daughter, and off she would go to live and work and raise her child, and that was as it should be. And Susannah would have to find, at last, some real thing of her own. And Portia, also, some real thing of her own. But not today.
Today she had driven north on the well-remembered road, passing all the well-remembered landmarks, but by the time she crossed the border she had begun to feel a distinct gravitational pull: east, across the river and the state line, past a red barn and a hex sign, into the woods, and on down a dirt road absurdly named Inspiration Way. She drove without a real—or at least an examined—objective, only a gradual and building sense of being drawn in. But as Portia actually passed the homemade sign for the Quest School she suddenly remembered to be several things at once: embarrassed, for one, and of course guilty, and not a little worried about how she would be received.
To her surprise, there were other cars on the dirt road, three of them backed up and waiting where the drive ended at the small parking lot. This was not unrelated to the fact that something seemed to be happening at the school. Cars were being directed into a field and parking in an obedient line along the ground. Beyond the barn, an open-sided tent fluttered over rows of folding chairs. Portia would have liked to turn around, but there was no way to do it until she reached the head of the line, and when she did, she saw to her chagrin that John was stationed there, greeting the drivers. He looked entirely shocked to see her, and she decided she had to say something first.
“I think I’ve come at a bad time,” said Portia. “I had no idea you had an event. I’m going to come back.”
“It’s our graduation,” he said, frowning.
“I’ll come back,” she said again.
“No, stay. If Jeremiah knew you were here, he’d want you to stay. I mean, if you can stay.”
There were two cars behind her now. She pulled her own out of the way and cut the ignition. When she got out, he was already beside her.
“I don’t want to take you away from your post,” she said awkwardly.
“No, it’s all right. I have great faith that our guests will be able to figure out where to park. I’m amazed to see you, you know.”
“Oh?” said Portia, as if this were not entirely clear.
“Well, I just thought, you know, that was that.”
“I’m sure you were angry,” Portia told him. “And entitled to be.”
“Yes, a little,” he admitted. “But mostly at myself. I mean, disappear on me once, shame on you. Disappear on me twice, shame on me. I have no idea what’s going on with you. I guess I felt, if you wanted something from me, you know where I am.”
“I do know where you are.” She laughed and held up her hands. “As you see.”
He smiled, too. He was a little slow on the uptake, it seemed. He said: “I see.”
John looked at the car. It was jammed within an inch of its life.
“You always pack this light for a visit?”
“I’m moving to Hartland for a bit, to stay with my mother. Remember that baby she was talking about adopting? She was born two months ago. She’s called Alice. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
“How long is ‘a bit’” asked John. “Like, the summer?”
“Like, indefinitely. I’ve left Princeton.”
He looked at her intently. “The university? Or the town?”
“Both. Don’t look so surprised.” She couldn’t help laughing. “It’s not the end of the world. I needed a little shaking up, that’s all.”
“But… what are you going to do? Will you work at Dartmouth?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Well,” John said, considering, “you could always write a book. Doesn’t everyone who leaves Ivy League admissions write a ‘how to get into college’ book?”
She laughed. “I guess. But does the world really need another one?”
“You could help us,” he said, suddenly very serious. “We have twelve kids who are going to be seniors in…” He checked his watch. “About an hour and ten minutes. We have no idea what we’re doing. They could use a little guidance.”
Cars were rolling past them, Volvos and hybrids, some of them gently rusting, their backseats full of kids and coolers. They reminded Portia of the families she had grown up with: women alone with Asian daughters, women in pairs, an “It’s a Small World After All” of ethnicities. In the field beside the great barn, kids were running and screaming. The chairs in the open tent were in neat rows, but no one was sitting down yet. In and around the barn, students and adults and children were everywhere, drinking cider and setting up picnic tables, playing volleyball over a sagging net. She saw Deborah, talking intently with a couple of parents, gesturing so hard with her glass of cider that it sloshed dangerously around the rim. Then she noticed that Jeremiah was one of the volleyball players, leaping and slapping next to Nelson, who had—as Jeremiah did not—the grace of a natural athlete. They high-fived each other after every spike.
Portia could feel the late afternoon sun, dry and hot. She tipped up her face and closed her eyes and smiled. She was letting herself consider what John had said. She was letting herself consider a few things, actually.
“Why don’t you stay?” he asked her. “Come to graduation. Stay for dinner. We have a potluck. We have a band coming later. You can see Jeremiah. I know he wants to thank you for what you did.”
Portia looked at him, newly alert. “What do you mean?” she said, barely audibly.
“Well, I’m sure you had to argue for him. I know he couldn’t have been an easy kid to say yes to. I’m very grateful, too. I was going to write to you,” he said, looking away. “I really was.”
“It’s okay,” she told him. “You gave me some good chances, and I really blew them.”
He looked at her carefully. He took a long time. She was, she realized, inviting him to make his own conclusions, and when he did, she let him know that they were her conclusions, too.
“Hartland, Vermont?” he said, looking pleased with himself. “That’s courtin’ distance in New England, you know.”
“I beg yo
ur pardon?” Portia said.
“Up here in the mountains, courtin’ distance is… let me see, as far as a cow can travel between milkings.”
“Well, I don’t know very much about cows, but that does sound unlikely. I mean, it’s got to be fifty miles from here to Hartland. You can’t expect a cow to walk that far.”
“Did I say walk?” he said archly. “You’re totally allowed to load the cow in a truck. Absolutely. It’s the twenty-first century!”
Portia laughed. “And you are the authority on this? Do I need to remind you that you grew up on the Main Line?”
“No, please don’t. They say it takes three New Hampshire generations before you’re not a Flatlander. I’m trying to pass here. If you blow my cover, I’m going to look very uncool.”
“Oh yes, I can see you’re trying to pass,” Portia told him, fingering the sleeve of his blue button-down shirt. “You look quite the native in this fine Brooks Brothers ensemble.”
“I am attempting to put the ‘gentleman’ back in ‘gentleman farmer,’” he informed her.
“Well, good luck with that.”
He smiled at her. He had, she now recalled, a beautiful smile.
“So you’ll stay.”
Portia looked again at the volleyball game, in time to see Jeremiah and Nelson, each reaching for the same high ball, crash into each other instead. Jeremiah’s parents, it suddenly occured to her, must be here, somewhere. Their son was graduating from high school, and this day with him did not belong to her.
“No. Thank you,” she told John. “I’d better keep going. My mother has never asked me for help in her life, but her phone calls are getting a little frantic. I don’t think she really remembered how hard it was, having a baby in the house.”
“It is hard,” he agreed. “But worth it.”
“Yes,” Portia said carefully. “I’m sure that’s true. And I would love to stay, but as you’ve so charmingly pointed out, I’m going to be close enough to drive a pig on a motorcycle. Or something like that. So another time, yes?”
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