Daybreak

by Belva Plain

  He took Bud’s car. Mom’s sleek Mercedes stood between it and the van, so he didn’t have to see the van. He had purposely not let himself look at it since that night. Poor Bud.

  At seven o’clock, having the key to the house door, he climbed the stairs to the topmost tower room that Robbie had described and knocked.

  He heard the flurry of her feet and her startled, still sleepy cry, “Who is it?”

  “Polar bear,” he growled, and when she opened the door, thrust the animal into her face.

  Laughing, she half crying, they fell together onto the bed. Her hands caressed his cheeks and his hair. The blood drummed in his ears. Her arms twisted around his neck.

  “My God, I’ve missed you! My God, I love you. Tom, Tommy, it’s been a hundred years.”

  Her fingers twisted, unfastening, unbuttoning, stripping, until he was as naked as she. He had for an instant a queer sense of being an observer, of seeing two bodies entangled in each other, arms, legs, and lips, a sense of seeing himself, as in the last moment before the plunging darkness, he caught the morning light on her moist, glistening eyes and her glistening teeth; then he sensed no more, neither Robbie nor himself, only that vast, sweet, thoughtless dark.

  All day they lay together, sleeping, making love and once more sleeping. When late in the day the sky dimmed and the room went blue with dusk, they woke up rested, enlivened and starving. Unwilling to leave the room, they settled for doughnuts and coffee.

  “Why are you smiling?” Robbie asked.

  “Because you’re so delightful, so beautiful and so smart, and I’m so happy.”

  “When are you coming down here for good?”

  “I’ll stay tonight, go home to pack up and be back for registration on Friday.”

  “We’ll have a great year. Very busy,” she warned, suddenly earnest. “The campaign people expect us to produce on this campus. After all, practically everybody here is over eighteen. I’d like to see a good turnout. It’ll take work, though.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “We’re going to go places with Johnson, you and I. We’ve already caught his eye, you know that. And he wants young people to build beyond this campaign, to build for the future.”

  “I’m ready,” he repeated.

  She said softly, “I didn’t want to do anything to spoil our day, but I just have to tell you again how sorry I am about this whole rotten time you’ve had, Timmy almost dying, and then losing your dad that way. They ought to boil that guy alive. No trial, no lawyers, nothing. Just boil him alive.”

  Tom nodded.

  “I know you must have times when you’re right down at the bottom of a pit. I really love my dad, and when my parents split up, not that there’s any comparison with what’s happening to you, I was so hurt to think he could leave me and go so far away. And then when my brother got on drugs, I was right down at the bottom of that pit. It took a long time for me to climb out. Times I thought I never would, but I did. It gets better after a while, believe me. You don’t think so, but it does.”

  He started to open his mouth, to say, “Robbie, I need to tell you something,” but stopped. Maybe later the words would come more easily.

  “Isn’t this a lovely room?” asked Robbie for the third or fourth time.

  He understood how much this little haven meant to her. She must have lived in miserable conditions, he thought tenderly, and thinking so, said, “Robbie, you haven’t said what you pay for this room, but since I’m going to enjoy so much of it, too, it’s only right that I help pay.”

  “Well, I won’t say no, and yet are you sure you can afford it? I mean, are things going to be different for you now?”

  “I can afford it,” he said firmly.

  “You’re so good to me, Tom. The little things you think of, like this bear.” She picked it up and hugged it. “I’m going to call him ‘Tom, Jr.’ Look at his big brown sexy eyes.” And she caressed the bear, holding its plump white head between her pink satin breasts.

  “Oh, Robbie!” he cried, “I wish I could stay here in this room with you forever and forever.”

  Then he knew he must have frightened her with his cry because she dropped the bear and stared at him.

  “What is it? What’s the matter? You look so desperate all of a sudden.”

  “I am desperate,” he said. “I have a lot of trouble.”

  “Oh, tell me. Let me help you. What is it?”

  His hands had begun to sweat, yet his mouth was dry. He got up for a glass of water, drank it all down, and then began.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but, well, have you ever heard of a case where an infant was switched with another at birth and was given to the wrong family?”

  “Yes, I think I even read about it once in the papers or some magazine. Why?”

  A large lump had formed somehow in his throat, making it hard to talk. Trying to swallow it, he took more water.

  “Well,” he began again, made a gesture of despair and stopped. “I don’t even know how to tell you properly.”

  “What do you mean?” Robbie’s eyebrows rose, and her eyes were stretched wide in alarm. “You don’t mean yourself, that you—”

  For a moment, unable to answer her, he propped his elbow on the chair’s arm and rested his forehead in his hand. Robbie sprang up and knelt on the floor at his chair.

  “Tom, Tom, is it you? Is it?”

  “Yes,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

  There was a long silence. When at last he looked up at her, she was crying.

  “My poor guy. My poor guy. You don’t have to talk anymore now if you don’t want to. It can wait till you feel better.”

  When she put her cheek against his, he felt her wet lashes, felt her compassion, and suddenly it became possible to let the whole incredible tale spill forth.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, that the messenger should have been Ralph Mackenzie, of all people?” he said when he had finished, after long minutes during which she had sat spellbound.

  “Yeah. A bearer of good tidings, as usual. God Almighty, of all the weird things to happen to a person. You live nineteen years, and then one day just like that”—and she snapped her fingers—“you find out you’ve been in the wrong place the whole time. I can’t imagine it. Can’t imagine myself.”

  “The awful thing is that it feels like the right place.”

  “Tell me, how do your parents—I mean, how did your father take it? I can’t imagine them, either. It could almost drive a person crazy, I think.”

  “Mom’s broken up, but you wouldn’t think so if you didn’t know her. She’s a very controlled person, always keeps the lid on, tries to hide her red eyes for my sake, tries to reason things out. You know the type. And you have to admire all that. At the same time, it can also make you mad as hell.”

  “And your dad? Was he—”

  “Oh,” Tom said, “it was pathetic. Poor Dad, he refused to believe it. Almost the last words he ever spoke to me were, ‘It’s all a tricky pack of lies, Tom. Don’t let them fool you.’ Almost the last words before they—”

  Robbie’s forehead crinkled into an anxious frown. “But is it possible that he was right, though?”

  Tom drew a long sigh. “How I wish! No, it’s not. Actually, I’m almost sure Dad knew the truth, too. He simply didn’t want to accept it, so he talked himself into denial. Look, we went through two weeks’ worth of medical tests, blood work, DNA and mitochondria, the way they identified the Czar’s bones. The works. Then there’s the business about the other guy, the one my age, having the same disease Timmy has. Dad was too intelligent to discount all that. It came down to the question of accepting it, that’s all. And he couldn’t.”

  “Do you think he ever would have?”

  “Who knows? But yes, I think he would have had to in the end.”

  “And have you accepted, Tom? I mean as much as anybody ever could? I mean, are you over the worst, mind-boggling shock of it?”

  He bent down and stro
ked the heavy hair back from the tiny, anxious face. “I’ve had a lot of mornings when I was sorry I had woken up, and I mean that, Robbie. The thing that kept me going was knowing that I would be able to talk to you.”

  “My Tom, my Tom, what you’ve been through!”

  “It isn’t over yet.” He spoke quietly now as he began to recognize in himself the return of his usual optimism. “Those people, those other people, they want me to—I don’t know exactly what they do want—to recognize them, I suppose. Just recognize, whatever that involves.”

  “Don’t you want to at all?”

  “No. And I don’t know how to handle it. They pressure me. Even Mom does. I’m supposed to be home today to meet them. That’s why I sneaked out. Maybe you have some advice for me. I hope so, because I need it. God, how I need it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Well, it’s a small world, as they say. You know that department store downtown not two miles from where we’re sitting right now?”

  “Sure, Crawfield’s, where I bought my new curtains and black lace nightgown. Is that where they work, or where the man works?”

  “They don’t work there, they own it.”

  “Own it? Crawfield’s? Still the original owners?”

  “The grandfather founded it, I think, and they still have it.”

  Robbie was puzzled. “But they’re Jews. Everybody knows they are. They can’t be your—”

  “Oh yes, they can be. My luck. My luck, Robbie.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, staring at him. “I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true.”

  She sprang up and stood leaning against the window frame, still staring at him. “It can’t be. You can’t be.”

  “You and my poor dad,” Tom said sorrowfully.

  “A Jew,” she said.

  He saw that she was trembling. Just so had he trembled, with his arms and his legs gone weak while his very heart had seemed to gasp in his breast, that day when Mom had called him to her and told him. And now, comprehending Robbie’s anguish, he was very, very gentle.

  “I’ll get through it,” he said consoling her. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to let anything like this ruin my life—our lives together.”

  “A Jew,” she repeated. “You. How does it feel?”

  “Feel?” A puzzling question. “Why, no way, really, that I can describe except stunned. People came and told me, that’s all, the way I’m telling you.”

  “You must feel different.” Her voice was flattened with a tone he had never heard from her before.

  “Different? Not inside myself. No, I haven’t changed. I’m myself. What I’ve always been, no matter what anybody tells me.”

  “But something tells me you’ve known it all along, and you’ve hidden it.” Tears started in her eyes.

  He was astounded. “My God, Robbie, what are you saying?”

  “That you knew it and you were afraid to tell me.” “My God, Robbie, I swear I’ve told you the whole truth. If I had wanted to hide it, why would I have revealed it today?”

  She did not answer. When he moved toward her, she recoiled, flattening herself against the wall. Her tears spilled over, shining on her cheeks.

  “Listen to me. Help me,” he pleaded. “I counted on you.”

  Still she did not answer. An alteration had occurred. This that he was seeing in her eyes was not only shock and grief; it was also anger. She frightened him.

  He pleaded again. “I’m Tom, the same Tom I was five minutes before you heard my story.” And he tried to laugh, a wan, weak apologetic laugh, as though this were all some sort of foolish joke.

  “You tricked me, Tom,” she said, “and I hate myself.”

  He didn’t want to believe he had heard her. And he stretched out his hand.

  “Come here. Take my hand. It’s clean, it’s kind, it has touched you softly and loved every part of your body.”

  “Stop it. Do you have to remind me? Do you think I shall ever forgive myself?” She began to sob. “What am I going to tell people? What am I going to do now?”

  “You’ll tell people that I haven’t committed any crime, and we’re going to go on as we were before.”

  “This has nothing to do with a crime. It’s not what you ever did or didn’t do, it’s what you are. Do I have to explain? You don’t need an explanation, you know what I’m talking about.”

  Yes, yes, he knew, but this was different … And putting his arms around her, he pulled her to himself, murmuring her name.

  “Robbie, Robbie darling, don’t talk like this. Robbie darling—”

  Her sudden shove was so fierce that he went stumbling. Appalled, he grasped the back of a chair, crying, “This can’t be you! What’s happened to you? The way you look at me—”

  “It’s me, all right,” she said grimly. “Do you really think it’s possible for me to look at you the way I did before I knew this? Do you?”

  He was desperate, and desperately he tried an appeal to reason.

  “Listen to me. Listen. I’m the same Tom. Look at my face, my hands … I’m the identical person. They’ve given me a new label, that’s all … How can that change me? You loved me, Robbie.”

  “What was, was. This is now.”

  “I was part of you. We were part of each other. And we worked together. You respected me. You’ve said so a hundred times.”

  “I didn’t know, did I? That was all under false pretenses.”

  “Why don’t you call Jim Johnson? Or we can both talk to him together. He’s an intelligent man. He’ll straighten this out. He’ll understand the situation I’m in.”

  “Are you kidding? He’ll advise me to get rid of you in the next five minutes.”

  He was frantic. And glancing around the room as if he was seeking for something, an iota of common sense, he saw a copy of Hitler’s book lying on a chair. When he picked it up, her eyes followed him.

  “So would you,” he asked slowly, “so would you have had me killed if we had been living at that time, in that place?”

  “Don’t ask useless questions. I’m not killing you now, am I?”

  “You are. You’re doing it slowly.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere with this talk. It’s melodrama, and it disgusts me,” she said with a shudder.

  “It isn’t melodrama, it’s real life.”

  And they stood there facing each other as two people who, meeting in an unfamiliar place, might be not quite sure of each other’s identity.

  Then suddenly Robbie fell apart, and her voice screamed out in shrill, contemptuous laughter.

  “Crawfield! Wouldn’t my mom be happy to hear that! She’d kill you for laying a hand on me, and me for letting you do it.”

  He looked at her blazing eyes and her contorted mouth. It seemed to him that the world was crazy, and he said so.

  “The world is crazy, and you’ve gone crazy, too.”

  “You think so? No. I’m very, very sane, and you’d better believe it. And what’s more, you’d better get out. Fast, too. Hear me?”

  She was screaming loud enough to be heard in the basement. In a minute somebody would be knocking at the door. He reached for his clothes; all this time he had been in his underwear and must look absurd. She hadn’t even the decency to turn away while he put his pants on. She just stood there watching him.

  He hated her. Hated, and understood how a law-abiding human being can be driven in one mad moment to murder. Let him get the hell out of here.… He picked up his duffel and went to the door.

  “Wait,” she said, “take this, too.” And she handed him the polar bear, Tom, Jr., with the beautiful brown sexy eyes.

  And he left without a word.

  What was it that he felt back on the highway speeding home? Hatred was too simple. There had to be much more to it: rage, shame, and grief. Which of them was uppermost, he did not know. He only knew that he had been crushed and trampled on, that he was in despair. His Robbie, whom he thought he kn
ew! He began to sob, and hoped no one would see him lest he be arrested as a drunken driver. He drove and drove, with hours ahead of him, going home to he knew not what. Recriminations, probably, because of the damned Crawfields again. But he had no other place to go.

  Suddenly he was hungry. At a diner he stopped and ordered a hamburger with french fries. Yet when the plate was put in front of him, he did not want it.

  The waitress, a tired young woman, inquired whether anything was wrong with the food.

  “No,” he said, “I made a mistake, that’s all.” He paid the bill, left a tip, and suddenly asked, “Do you have a child?”

  “Why, yes—” she began, and then, suspiciously, demanded, “Why? What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not being personal. It’s just—Wait a minute.”

  He ran out to the car and came back with the bear. “Here,” he said, “this is for your kid.”

  Astonished at the obviously expensive toy, she apologized. “I didn’t mean to give you a nasty answer. This is so nice of you. I really didn’t mean—”

  “That’s all right. You were being careful, and you have every right to be, the world being what it is and people what they are.”

  And he ran out, leaving her staring after him.

  It was almost midnight when he turned into the driveway and put the car into the garage. The house was dark except for the ceiling light above the piano where his mother was playing. And recognizing the fragmented, wandering strains of Debussy, he knew that she was still deeply sad.

  Not ready to go inside, he sat down on the steps of the veranda. It was a dark night, and the stars were brilliant, there the Big Dipper, there Ursa Major, there, beyond and beyond, another universe and yet more, unnamed, unseen, unknown. His eyes roved in a circle through the unfathomed glitter and returned to the backyard where suddenly a bird, no more ignorant than a man about the Ultimate, gave a startled cry.

  The world is crazy, he thought again as he had thought in the moment of Robbie’s transformation. She despised him! His Robbie! And Dad’s bloodied face was smashed. And a Rice was turned into a Crawfield, a damned Crawfield. Everything had gone wrong from that poisonous day when Mackenzie brought the message.