If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “There, there,” I say, imitating a grown-up. “Okay?” I pull away and look at my grandmother at arm’s distance.

  She wipes away a tear. I’m surprised at first and then strangely I expect it to be some kind of alien blue, like her eyes, like the sky, like the couch and the carpet, the napkins. All blue. But it’s just a regular colorless tear. “Darling,” she says, rubbing her hands along my arms now. “When did you get so grown-up?”

  I smile. But even I can tell it’s a different one than the smile I wore walking in here.

  We finish up the tea sandwiches—well, the cucumber ones—down some seltzers, and, yes, pop a purple macaron each down our gullets, and then we slap our thighs and tell Gram we’re heading out.

  “So soon?” she says, but I can tell she knows it’s not soon enough for us.

  I tell her we’ll be back by eleven, a random number and I’m counting on her and my mother not having discussed, well, anything, but I want time. For what? Who knows. I don’t. For the world to open up and swallow me or hug me or kick me to the moon. But here is this city that everyone has something to say about. Here is this city where my first mom lives.

  “Good luck, Ivy,” Gram says, all earnest and serious. “I love you, my dear,” she says.

  I smile back at her, genuinely, I love her, too, after all. I lean down and pick up Claire’s books, place them on the side table in the vestibule. I open the door. Who knows what New York will bring us. Who knows? I think as I lead us down the old hallway, my fingertips skimming the walls, skipping to the elevator and down into the lobby, nod to Milton, and then out into the city, Manhattan, where I know, this time, all my answers lie.

  Nelly Hellman

  1955

  Cornell University

  Helen Farber looks at her friend in disbelief. The snow is blowing in wild bursts, as if by a leaf blower across the empty campus. Lake effect is not to be taken lightly. The snow is piling up in huge heaps. Which means getting to class—they each have a final exam in the morning—will be even more difficult tomorrow.

  “Are you sure?” Helen asks.

  Nelly shakes her head. “I’m sure, Helen. I’ve skipped two periods. I assure you.”

  Helen looks out onto the quad at the blowing snow. “Are you going to tell Harry?”

  “Harry? My heavens, no!” Nelly says. “I can’t. Honestly, I don’t think he even understands one can get pregnant from such things. It was hardly even worth it. My goodness. Harry Cohen. My father would die for a hundred and three reasons. What will I do?”

  They both turn to the window. All the snow. A blizzard, nearly.

  “This is what we do. We take our exams tomorrow, as planned. Then we tell Abigail, because she has a car, and as soon as the streets are cleared we find a doctor.”

  Nelly looks up at the ceiling. She pictures Harry’s sweet open face. His big smile. All that hair. His tennis rackets and sweater-vests. The thing about Harry is he would be a very good father. And he was kind in his way. But Harry was not who her parents were counting on, really. It was simply not the time. Not for her. And not for them. Nelly thought of the ridiculous class she was supposed to take: Homemaking Apartments 300, where two instructors, five students, and a baby (recruited from a local orphanage) live together in an appointed apartment for nearly two months. She’d even rejected the course. No thank you—her final tomorrow was in engineering. She was one of only two girls in that class.

  “Okay,” Nelly says to her roommate, relieved. “Thank you, Helen.”

  Helen goes over and pats her friend on the back and sits down across from her. “Let’s put it out of our heads and get some sleep and then worry about it after the morning. Okay?”

  Nelly climbs into her bed, her silk pillowcase cold and slippery beneath her face. It did keep the curls intact, though, much longer than her cotton cases. Helen turns off the light and in a short time Nelly can hear the sound of Helen’s steady breathing. She thinks of telling Harry and maybe leaving school and perhaps going off with him and, well, being his wife, Homemaking Apartments in real life, and then someone’s mother, to boot. Imagine. Someone’s mother. It’s what she wants one day, for certain, perhaps it was just a sooner moment than she’d anticipated. And then she thinks of that Homemaking Apartments 300 course. Of that motherless baby in the clumsy shaking hands of students. It feels wrong to her. So deeply wrong, but before she can think why it bothers her so, she is fast asleep until her alarm wakes her at 7:00 for this terrible day awaiting her.

  Abigail Stoakly is a terrible driver in the snow. They slide across the street just getting out onto 79. They have three addresses but only one of the doctors is in town, the only one who will possibly perform an abortion. That one turns them away and sends them to Syracuse. After three hours, and two more doctors, they finally find someone—a friend of a friend of a cousin—who will do it but who wants more money than any of them has access to.

  “We’re going to be found out.” Abigail white-knuckles the steering wheel of her father’s Chrysler. “We’ll be found out and arrested and you, Nelly, will have your baby in prison! We might all go to prison, don’t you think?”

  “Stop it, Abigail. I hardly think that helps,” Helen says.

  “Well, you two walk around like you’re the bee’s knees just leaving Sage Hall at any hour, doing as you please, and now look at you. Look at her.”

  Nelly is horrified. Mostly because Abigail is not wrong. For the first time her heart catches and she feels she will cry.

  “Stop being such a bitch, Abigail,” Helen says.

  “Excuse me? How about you hitch home, then?” Abigail continues to drive, the car wobbling along in the snow. It’s eerie and isolated on these streets.

  “Stop, you two. Just stop it. Thank you, Abigail, for doing this. And, Helen, thank you for defending my honor and all of it. But maybe this is a sign. Maybe this isn’t meant to be. Let’s go back to school.”

  They both turn to look at Nelly in the back seat. “What are you saying, Nell?” Helen asks.

  “Well, let’s just say we do find someone. Not today or tomorrow, but sometime before my time is up and I pay him all the money he requires and I go in there alone and you, sweet friends, wait for me in some coffee shop nearby, and then what?”

  “Then it’s done,” Helen says very calmly. “We pick you up and go back to school. Then it’s over. It will be like it never even happened, Nelly!”

  “But it isn’t. You saw the papers. That girl in Albany died. She bled to death!”

  “That was awful,” Abigail said.

  “That was one person.”

  “One girl,” Abigail says.

  “It isn’t, though. There are all kinds of stories. And then there are the ones where the doctor reports you and then while you are almost bleeding to death you get arrested on top of it.”

  “Can you imagine?” Helen turns around. “Where are we anyway?” The snow is plowed but blowing madly around them, in massive swirls. It’s as if for this moment they are the only people on the road, in this town, on this planet.

  “I can’t,” Nelly says. “I can’t do it. I’m not a rebel. It’s just not who I am. I’m too scared. I’m not James Dean.”

  “Indeed,” says Abigail, laughing. She had been so scandalized by that movie when she’d seen it in town the previous month. “I don’t think he could be in your condition, now could he?”

  Nelly leans back miserably. “Please, Abigail, just take me home.”

  “Home?”

  “Back,” Nelly says. “Just back.”

  Nelly is back at school the following fall, and in the end, it is in fact like none of it happens. She merely takes the spring off to be with her ailing father. It’s a coincidence then, that he in fact does die, of heart failure. As if she’s willed it. It’s that September. Of course, she has not wished her father to be dead, but if it were to happen, which it was, his time was up, then this was as good a time as any. Nelly knows this is a horrible thing to think bu
t she can’t unthink it.

  People know different sets of information, depending on the needs of the situation. Her mother knows what has happened and visits her daughter weekly at the Home for Unwed Mothers in Montclair. Her father, before he is taken gravely ill, believes his daughter is in summer school, at Cornell, safely installed. She comes to him in the hospital at an appropriate time, given the new semester of the school year, after she has given birth. Abigail and Helen know why she’s gone, of course, and they receive her with knowing glances when she returns.

  No one but Nelly Hellman knows, however, where the baby goes.

  It is the one thing she insists on as she is being shuttled around and controlled and concealed, a punishment for two nights in bed with Harry Cohen, a wan lover at best. The baby—a daughter—goes to Susquehanna Valley, in Binghamton, New York. Helen learns this, too, when she interrogates Nelly, who leaves each weekend for Binghamton to visit her. There, Nelly holds her daughter and feeds her a bottle. Lulu Lulu Lu, she calls her, it just feels like who she is, and then Nelly leaves to finish her studies and dance the twist and go to mixers and sneak brownies into the library and smoke cigarettes in the stairwell.

  And then, one weekend in mid-February when she goes for her visit, her daughter is gone.

  “Darling, did you think she’d be there forever?” Helen cradles Nelly, as she would a baby, she supposes, in her lap as her roommate weeps and weeps.

  “Perhaps,” Nelly sobs. “Perhaps I did. Yes, I did.”

  “But she needs a home, too,” Helen says.

  Nelly has fantasies of Homemakers Apartment 300—living with her own daughter for course credit. And an unrelenting fear that someone else is doing the same, someone she knows, perhaps. She wonders about everything: who her new parents are, what they look like, where they live, what their dreams are. Her name. How she wishes she had found a doctor that night and he had killed her with a dirty coat hanger. Surely, she thinks, that would have been easier. Than this.

  What is her name?

  But here Nelly is. And Harry. He has been so good. She broke it off with him, of course, but then, when her father died, he reappeared. He was there. He is a good man and perhaps they will have a future together. There is no need for him to know anything about it. What would he think? There is no one now to disapprove of Harry anymore, is there? Her mother isn’t what they call available any longer. She is out from her gin by 8:00 p.m. Heaven knows Nelly is in no mood to be looking anymore. What would she find? Familiarity is a good, nice thing. And Harry is going to law school in the city, at Columbia.

  The baby is gone, Nelly thinks as her dear friend smooths her hair out of her warm, wet face. Gone!

  She can’t stop imagining it. A big, open house with a grand staircase. A farmhouse, filled with animals and pies cooling on the sill. A room in a broken-down city. Lulu Lulu Lu. What do you do with all this wondering? Lulu.

  “There, there,” says Helen.

  But she can’t be soothed. Not really. Where is my baby?

  She wonders will she ever have another thought again.

  Ivy

  2017

  New York City

  Milton hails us a taxi to go downtown. I watch him hold out his hand, white gloved, and one just pulls up, smooth as Gram’s silk couch.

  It’s this beautiful day. Golden light off the river, the cars, the building, casting all kinds of magic light.

  We slide in, Patrick, me, Claire. The cabdriver says, “Where to, guys?”

  Claire and Patrick look at me. “Yes,” Claire says. “Wherever to?”

  “You are being strangely enigmatic,” Patrick says, squeezing my hand.

  I unfold the printout that has been crumpled in my bag, smooth it out on the tabletop of my legs. “New York University,” I say to the driver.

  Claire looks over my shoulder, tilts her head. “What is that?”

  The printout of the email. What the real one I didn’t show my mothers says is: Hi, Andrea. It’s so nice to hear from you. I’m in school at NYU. Finally, school. And I’m in the classroom three days a week now. Teaching! I’m going to be a teacher. Hopefully. It would be great to see you and meet Ivy whenever she is ready.

  I never responded.

  I lied to all of my mothers. And to this one I said I was searching on behalf of my mother, the adoptive one.

  Because I didn’t want to lie and tell her, yes, my parents know.

  Because I got what I needed. New York City. Just as Mom thought.

  Because what would I say?

  “Yeah, what is that?” Patrick asks.

  “That’s a big place, my friend,” our driver says, pretty much answering for me. “What building? Where? My niece goes there, I’m proud to say. Right on the beautiful Washington Square Park. But it’s a big place. You can get very lost there.”

  “Washington Square Park!” I say to the driver. “We’ll start there,” I say to Patrick and Claire.

  The driver turns off and we’re on a highway along the river. Sailing beneath buildings and through tunnels and down down down until he turns off and cuts into the city. There’s something so exciting and so terrifying about being here, on our own. Forget what I am looking for. Being here, the three of us, just having a day in this place, all our own.

  The driver pulls up to a street corner. “There,” he says, pointing.

  What do I see? Paths to a fountain, catching golden light. It’s after three already, we’re, like, starting out in the evening, and here is an arch in the distance, casting shadows. It feels like I’m already too late as I pay and we get out, hands in pockets that somehow makes it seem like we know what we are doing or where we are supposed to be going.

  We get out of the cab and Claire says, “Please say you know where you’re going.”

  “I gotta say,” says Patrick, “I’m with Claire on this one. Where we going, B? Is she even here? In New York? We just sort of let you lead us without really asking very much because this is your thing,” he says.

  Claire nods.

  I look at my friend and my boyfriend, in agreement on something for maybe the first time. I take I deep breath.

  I nod. “Yes,” I say. “She’s here. She’s at school here.” I point to a building that I now see is the library.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  “Yes, tell us.” Claire hits Patrick on the shoulder.

  Then I do it. I explain how I contacted her by saying I was my adoptive mother and that she is somewhere in this city taking classes, probably NYU.

  “Probably?” Patrick says.

  “No, she said it. Okay, look.” I pull out the printed note and unfold it, like it’s a map to something, which in a way it is.

  Claire takes it. She reads and nods.

  “She does say NYU.” She hands it to Patrick.

  He reads it, too.

  “Okay,” he says. “So we can assume she does classes when she’s not teaching, and if she teaches three days a week, I mean, who does stuff Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, right?”

  I am eager to be helped and my eager nodding reveals this.

  “So tomorrow is Friday. Where does she teach?”

  I shrug. Claire throws up her arms.

  “Okay, then,” Patrick says. “Or we could look for her around here but, I mean, how will we do that?”

  Claire is on her phone and she holds it up to us. There is a teeny tiny map of the campus, like a map to a dollhouse compound. “The teaching school is over there.” She points to the section of the park where we were dropped off. “We could see if we can get any info from the office there.”

  “We could!” I say. I feel hopeful.

  “We could,” Patrick says. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, like, giving all kinds of information about a student. I’m sure that won’t be a problem.”

  The day. The day! It is shining and music is playing and it smells like pretzels and salt and weed and spring. I kind of just want to be in this day, too. “Should we pretend we’re
someone?” I ask.

  “Pretend?” Claire says incredulously.

  “You’re her daughter,” Patrick says, and I feel like I will throw up.

  “Let’s go,” Claire says. “This is why we’re here.” She pulls me by the wrist, Patrick following, as we go across the park and out and into the building across the street with the NYU purple flag flying.

  We enter the building and, before we can even get our breath, we are stopped immediately.

  “ID, please,” the man at security says, pointing at the high-tech walk-through machines that have winded us when they stopped so suddenly as we tried to pass through.

  “Oh, sorry, we don’t have one. I’m actually, well”—I look around the steel lobby—“I’m actually looking for my mother?”

  “Really, now,” he says, crossing his arms. His badge shines. He widens his stance.

  “No, really, she is,” Patrick says.

  “You all students here?” he asks.

  We all shake our heads. No.

  “Call your mother and tell her to come get you.”

  “The thing is,” I say, “I don’t have her number. I mean, she’s not expecting me. She doesn’t know me.”

  There is some heavy nodding, from everyone now.

  “Well, no ID, no entry,” he says.

  “Awww, really?” Claire says. “We came all this way.”

  “Honey,” he begins, and I see her bracing. “This is New York City. We have to be strict about who comes in here. There is a lot of stuff that goes down around here you don’t want to know about. You look like very nice kids and I hope you find your mother, but you can’t come in this building or any other NYU building without ID.”

  Patrick salutes him. “Got it,” he says.

  And we turn and walk out of the building and into the sun.

  What is the opposite of hopeful? I suppose that’s easy: it’s hopeless. I suppose that is what I feel then. Utterly. Patrick senses this and he takes my hand.