by Belva Plain
But one night in the seventh month of Margaret’s pregnancy something happened. They were awakened again, this time by dreadful cries. When they rushed to him Peter was lying with his legs drawn up to his stomach, turning and turning in obvious pain from one side of the crib to the other. So then they were back in the hospital, and there, on that anxious night—how many anxious days and nights they knew!—a clever young resident was the first to make them aware of some facts.
“The child is very, very seriously ill. I suggest you call in Dr. Lear,” he said. “Lear’s one of the best internists in the state.”
Arthur begged him: “What do you think it is?”
“I have no right to say,” the young man answered. “I’ve made no tests.”
“But you have some idea. Please give us your idea. I understand your position, and I won’t repeat what you say to anyone. Please.”
There was something irresistible about Arthur’s quiet appeal and so, after several minutes had passed, the doctor relented.
“It may be cystic fibrosis,” he told them. “But remember, that is only a hunch, a guess, and I should not be saying it.”
Nevertheless, that clever young man was right. After him, they embarked on a long journey of discovery.
First there was Dr. Lear, “one of the best internists in the state.” In his white office, under bright lights, the little body of Peter Crawfield was X-rayed, tested, prodded and probed by gentle, expert fingers.
“I’m afraid it is what we feared,” the doctor told them finally. His glance went from Arthur’s face to Margaret’s, passing quickly over Margaret’s by-now-enormous abdomen; his expression seemed to say that this was a sad place for a woman in her condition to be. “As I told you, before I become certain, this will be a hard road to travel. I always believe in being frank.”
“He may be expert, and he certainly was nice, but I don’t believe him,” said Margaret, going down the steps from the office.
Arthur said only, “Shall we try elsewhere?”
“Of course we shall. Anyone with a brain in his head looks for a second opinion.”
So they looked and so they received it: the same. The baby might live for a year or two or maybe into young manhood, or die anytime in between. He could be subject to pneumonia, diabetes, heat prostration, intestinal distress, or heart failure; he will need extensive, prudent, careful rearing and watching … After the fourth or fifth try they knew it all by heart.
Patiently, Arthur, knowing better, acceded to Margaret’s pleas; by car, plane, and local train they went with their bundled baby from doctor to doctor, and came at last full circle to where they had begun.
“Enough,” Arthur said. “We’ve come to the end. Now accept.”
It was, in a way, a relief.
The family, parents and grandparents, gathered on that final evening in Arthur’s den. The grandparents were shell-shocked.
“I looked it up the minute you got off the phone,” said Albert, the grandfather. “Cystic fibrosis runs in families! No one, as far back as I can go, not any of us on Margaret’s side, ever had it. What about you, Arthur?”
“Nobody,” Arthur said miserably. “Of course there can be some ancestor so far back that no one even knows his name. Anyway, it doesn’t always have to be inherited. It can just happen.”
“Supposedly everything we are is in the genes,” responded Albert, in equal misery.
“What’s the difference?” cried Margaret. “What is, is, and there’s no changing it. I’m worried now …” Her voice trailed off. Her hands rested on the rounded heap where the next baby lay waiting soon to be born.…
But Holly was strong and well from the moment she made her appearance. With her there were no crises, no worries or daily cares about pneumonia or diet or diabetes—or anything, certainly none of the symptoms or effects of anything as dire as cystic fibrosis. She was a joy, although not an easy joy like Peter! Headstrong, affectionate, argumentative, warmhearted and stubborn, she was certainly not like him.
“Holly is you, as Peter is Arthur.” That was the informed opinion of relatives and friends.
“Informed opinion,” said Margaret, lying now on Peter’s bed in the waning afternoon. Like Arthur. Arthur’s boy.
And it was not true! He was … whose boy? Her hands, lying at her sides, made fists. Her wedding ring cut her flesh. Not true! So there was another grief! How many kinds of grief was a person supposed to bear? How to resolve the conflict?
“My heart breaks over Peter,” she whispered. “Breaks, do you hear? But that other, that other who is also mine, was mine … oh God, how much, how many sorrows?”
* * *
She was still lying there when Arthur came home. She heard his keys jingle as he laid them on the hall table and heard his call.
“Margy? I’m home. Where are you?”
“Upstairs. I’ll be right down,” she said, not wanting him, on his first day back at work, to come up and see her weeping in that room; she must be strong for him, must help him.
But he was already at the top of the stairs. When he saw where she was, he came in and put his arms about her, holding her without speaking.
“All those years,” she murmured. “Our Peter. Nineteen, this summer.”
“Yes, yes. A short life. My God! And all the time he knew, I’m sure he knew, it would be short.”
“Can you absorb in your head or your heart that he was not born to us? He was so much ours! How can it have happened, Arthur?”
“Who can say? A careless nurse breaks the ID bracelets, that’s all. It’s happened, and it’s happened to us.”
“I feel,” she said, “I feel this is a double death, as if—” And she put her hand on the place where her womb lay, where she had nurtured a child. “Isn’t there—can’t we find out what happened to the—the other one?”
“You know the Barnes Clinic closed down years ago,” he reminded her gently.
She persisted. “The records had to be transferred somewhere.”
He was silent.
“Don’t you want to know, Arthur?”
He replied, so low that she hardly heard him, “I guess maybe I don’t.”
“But why? I don’t understand!”
“Because—because what good will it do?”
“I need,” she whispered, and gulped to control the lump of tears that was determined to rise in her throat, “I need to know whether he—the other one—has a good home. Suppose they are terrible people, alcoholic or cruel, or he’s sick or hungry somewhere—”
Arthur had released her and stood now, with his back to her, at the wall. Peter’s high school diploma hung there, but he was not looking at it. After a minute or two he turned about and answered her plea.
“Let’s assume we can be successful in our search, and that’s quite an assumption in the circumstances, rather like the needle in the haystack; what good will it do? If the home isn’t a good one, there’s nothing we can do about it. The boy’s an adult. It’s too late.”
“Still, I want to know.”
Arthur continued, reasoning deliberately, “And if the home is a good one, we will be disrupting it. Think of the lives we will overturn! The boy’s life most of all, but his family’s too, and probably Holly’s as well. Here she is now. Let’s leave this room.”
They were in their own bedroom when Holly came up the stairs. Her cheeks were pink from running. Her legs, below the red miniskirt, were slim and strong. Clear sky and fresh air, thought her father, looking at her.
“Hi, Dad.” She kissed his cheek. “I’ve got a load of work to catch up on. How was your day?” Embarrassed, she corrected herself. “I mean, how could it be? I mean, I hope it wasn’t too awful, your first day back at the office. Oh Lord, I guess I don’t know what I mean.”
“It’s all right,” Arthur said tenderly. “We all know what we mean. Can I help you with anything? Latin? I used to be pretty good at it.”
“No thanks, Dad. I’ll let you know, though, i
f I need you.”
“She’s all we have now,” he said, after she left the room.
The tiny hammers had started up again in Margaret’s head.
“All?” she repeated. “Can you really forget about the other?”
“Forget? Of course I can’t. Do you think I haven’t thought, about him, even before Peter died? From the day we were told about it, I’ve thought. And I believe, I do believe, better let it lie, Margaret. Let’s accept the accomplished fact, as we must accept the fact of Peter’s death, and go on living as well as we can. Take care of Holly. Pick up the broken pieces and try to put them together.”
“I don’t know whether I can,” she murmured. And suddenly she cried out, “How I wish Peter would come back and tell us this is all a nightmare!”
“I know, Margy, but he can’t.” Arthur’s voice cracked; he felt all her pain, the mirror image of his own.
Yes, thought Margaret, a double death, that’s what it is. We brought you home, Peter, we loved you so, we cared for you and we followed you to your grave.
“And they tell us,” she said aloud, “that he was never meant to be ours! That somewhere—where?—the other one—will you really not want to find out, Arthur? Never?”
“Margy, Margy, ‘never’ is a long time. Let me think, I’m so tired and confused. I’ll have to think. I should think, and I can’t.”
PART
II
Laura
CHAPTER
2
The place in which Laura Rice—Mrs. Homer Thomas Rice—was born and grew up is a large town, or it might be described as a very small city, halfway between the Mississippi and the Atlantic. It is southern, its winters chilly but short, so that daffodils come to life in February. There is an impressive avenue through its heart; at intervals this avenue interrupts itself by turning a circle, at the center of which there stands a statue of some Confederate statesman, most often on horseback. Fine brick houses face each other across this avenue; as you travel farther out toward the country, toward the hills, the avenue becomes a suburban road, and the houses surround themselves with lawns and grand old trees, redbud, beech, and oak.
“You must treasure this place,” said Laura’s good aunts who had reared her since she was three years old. “It was built just after the War, in 1870. When you are older, you will appreciate it even more. Solid brick it is, no fake brick facing. Solid as a rock. The slate roof alone would cost a fortune these days.”
Memory goes back to the age of three, so it is said, and indeed it was where Laura’s began. Even without understanding them, she had accepted the facts that her father had gone to Heaven from a place called Korea, and her mother had gone to Heaven from the hospital, that large white building downtown near the store where aunts Cecile and Lillian, after a visit to the hospital with Laura, had taken her to buy a large blond doll in a carriage with a pink blanket. And after that, they had brought her back to the family house where they themselves had been born in the wide mahogany bed now occupied by Laura and her husband, Homer, known by all as Bud.
Bud Rice, the respectable and respected, prosperous and generous, proud father of sons, dependable, honest, and—
And what? What other word? Uncomprehending, maybe?
For there were things that he never understood, that after nineteen years of marriage, she knew he never would understand. The way she cringes when he reprimands a clumsy waiter in a restaurant. (“But I am paying for service,” he says, which is true enough.) The way he laughs with relish at cruel racial jokes. Even the way, when music lingers after it has ceased, he cuts into the lovely silence.
Uncomprehending … And yet she wants to love him. She has always loved somebody, aunts, friends, teachers, and now her children. Yes, she wants to love her husband, and yet does not.
At the tall narrow windows now she parted the lace curtains and looked out. The heat was heavy, the afternoon asleep under a clouded molasses-colored sky. Soon it would thunder and rain would pour. Horses and cattle in the field can sense the oncoming storm, but the human being too is restless, so she thought, and releasing the curtain, turned back toward the quiet house.
Almost without aim, she wandered into the library; the “British” library, furnished in dark oak, was the inspiration of a grandmother become an Anglophile after a trip to England long years ago. Its creamy plaster walls were embossed with scattered flowers: the rose for England and the thistle for Scotland. Under the diamond-paned Elizabethan windows stood the piano, a medium-sized grand. This was Laura’s own. It was here that she gave lessons. Music ready for the afternoon’s pupil was already open on the rack. The books belonged to her and to their son Tom, there being no other readers in the family. The photographs that were on the shelves and tables belonged to them all.
Here was her father, a young major in his cap with a sweep of hair just barely visible. “The hair of the black Irish,” Aunt Lillian said. Her mother’s thin face, tense and witty, regarded him from the other half of the double leather frame. There were the formal photographs of Laura and Bud together, taken last Christmas as a present for the family. Still fair-haired, she was not one pound heavier than she had been as a twenty-year-old bride. But Bud’s thick fair hair, receding, had heightened a high forehead, and he had gained through the years a portly stomach. Yet he could still compete with Tom at tennis.
Something compelled her now to carry Tom’s picture to the light. It was as if by examining the face beneath the dark silky hair that fell across one eyebrow, the strong face with the high cheekbones, the wide-open gold-brown eyes and the obstinate mouth, she might find some answers to the questions that so troubled her, although they did not trouble Bud.
Tom was so—so determined! He was so bright, so keen, and could be so dear, but was yet so stubborn. With bulldog’s teeth he held to his convictions, and she despised his convictions. They were the ugly inventions of political fanatics, of men like Jim Johnson, who was now running for election to the state senate; a man old in spirit, he must be filled with God only knew what secret angers. That such a man should be able to corrupt the young, to corrupt my nineteen-year-old son! she cried in silent outrage.
Far to the rear of the house in the great kitchen, Betty Lee was polishing silver and humming gospel songs. Three times a week she graced the house with her healthy cheer, with her very presence. And Laura wondered how much she might know about Tom, whom she had fed and diapered. He had been ordered to keep Jim Johnson talk to himself, but there were all those books in his room.… Yet he was affectionate to Betty Lee. His heart was warm. She knew it was. Surely he did not belong with those people …
How different he was from his brother! His tall stance contrasted to Timmy’s, who stood half a head shorter than his eleven-year-old peers. His confident gaze beside the half smile on the small freckled face, that smile which with a touching pride concealed Tim’s fears.
And should Tim not be fearful? He knew too much about human suffering already, and knew what still awaited him when cystic fibrosis had run its course.
These thoughts, as always, made her pulses race. What if by some unlikely chance he should outlive Bud and me? she thought again. And she reminded herself: But Tom would take care of him. Tom loved him, Tom got up at night when Timmy coughed; Tom knew all the medications and cautions; he never let Tim get too tired or too hot. You could depend on Tom. He meant what he said and did what he promised to do.
Good sons, both. And each of them a gift of joy, each in his way a painful sorrow.
A sudden weariness born of these thoughts and of the dark day overcame her, and she lay down on the sofa, something she never did in the daytime, to wait for the four o’clock lesson. A plaster frieze of fruit and flowers ran where the ceiling met the wall. Idly her eyes followed it from grapevines to acorns, pine cones, wheat sheaves, and back to grapevines. The hard, monotonous rain beat on the roof of the porch. Powerful outside forces beat on the family … I hate these moods, she thought, closing her eyes. I shall will
this one to pass.
Nevertheless, there were times when the will was never enough, when the questions persisted as if they were written in tall red letters and even closed eyelids could not shut them out.
Who is this woman, this Laura Paige Rice, and how did she get from there to here?
Adults think that a child building a castle of blocks on the floor in the next room is too absorbed in play to hear their talk or even if she should hear it, to understand it.
“Poor little soul,” said a visitor, commiserating. And then briskly, brightly added, “But how lucky to have you girls to take over.”
The Paige sisters, Cecile and Lillian, would always in their circle, and should they live to be ninety, be “the girls.” But they were far from the stereotype that that term brings to mind: “ladies who lunch.” They were just as thin and fashionable in their expensive suits, but more significantly, they were out in the world; they were keeping their inherited place at Paige and Company.
“What did we know about wholesale building supplies? Lumber and wire and cement?” Lillian would say to anybody who would listen, and many did. “First our father, then our brother, and finally no one but us two girls to run that huge spread out on the highway. Well, if you’ve got a brain, it’s a challenge to use it. Besides, we had Laura to think of.”
They liked, these two aunts, to talk about Laura with their friends while the teacups clinked on the saucers on Sunday afternoons. Unmarried and already in their forties, they had been given a present of a pretty child, a responsibility, a beloved toy.
“She must have an inheritance. That’s the main reason we worked so hard to expand. It will mean security. A woman needs security.” People still talked that way about women in the 1950s. They took Laura’s picture under the enormous sign that read “Paige and Company,” and while she was still in nursery school, taught her to spell out the words.
“Yes, if it hadn’t been for Laura, who knows? We might even have sold out and retired.”
“But she is an enchanting child, isn’t she?” Cecile’s lovely voice rang with pleasure. “I do hope her hair stays blond. Blond hair,” she mused, “fastened back with a black velvet band, or navy blue.”
