Peggy read the letter over and over, and she looked at the snapshot for a long time before she replaced it in the back of A Girl of the Limberlost with her calendar. Painstakingly, she blotted out another day. Then the baby began to kick, and she went downstairs for tea with Aunt Alice, giving her a hug that nearly knocked her over.
After that, though she was often bored and uncomfortable in California, when she thought of Ray she was happy. It became easy for her to be kind to her aunt, patient with her uncle’s stories, charmed by walks through their city, no longer oppressed but pleased by the details of their quiet, luxurious domestic life, by oranges and mangoes and avocados, by the scent of eucalyptus, by soft white sheets and wine with dinner and plenty of cigarettes. She became friendly with women in the shops she went to regularly, and enjoyed the imaginary life she constructed for their benefit. She and her husband were so broke, she always said, with a laugh. Times were still hard, at least in her husband’s field, which was aviation. He had to stay with his parents until he got some money ahead and found them their own house. Then she and the baby would join him. Live with her mother-in-law? No sir! That battle-ax? Chatting over the counter, she could almost see her husband: a lot like Ray, maybe a bit taller, wearing a white scarf and a hat with earflaps, leaping into the cockpit of an airplane with a jaunty wave.
Ray kept his promise and wrote regularly, usually on hotel stationery from small towns in eastern Ohio and western New York State. She loved to think of him there, in places where there was nothing to do once he had performed his duty at the Pepsi plant. He would eat a lonely dinner, read a little, maybe take in a movie, occasionally get invited to the plant manager’s house for a home-cooked meal, but mostly he’d be alone, a traveling man who inspected bottling plants, a man with nothing to do but think of the girl he loved and write her letters.
When he was home, back in Syracuse, she knew he saw Caroline. He never mentioned it, but she had occasional letters from Caro informing her that she and Ray had gone to the movies (they saw The Lady Vanishes) or Ray had had dinner up at the house. Her mother wrote regularly every Sunday, and twice she mentioned that Ray had been there. Nell wrote about him too, disapprovingly: Ray had drunk too much beer, Ray had hardly talked at all at Sunday dinner, Ray had promised to bring Mother some cheese from that place in Canandaigua but he forgot, wouldn’t you know.
Peggy thought she would give anything to see him, just for ten minutes. And for him to see her. The worst of it, she sometimes thought, was that pregnancy was so becoming to her. Aunt Alice was always saying so—not in those words, just, “You seem to get prettier every day—doesn’t she, Ralph?” Or Cora, or Frances, or Claire. In spite of the clothes she had to wear, the frumpy smocks and dark baggy dresses, Aunt Alice’s old shoes because her own had become too tight, the voluminous gray gabardine raincoat, Peggy knew it was true. She had never had much color in her face, but now her cheeks bloomed. And her hair, which was always lank and wispy had, for some mysterious reason, acquired more snap; she was letting it grow, and it fell around her face in crisp waves. And her breasts were gorgeous globes as big as the melons they had at Sunday breakfast.
She used to adjust the tilting mirror in her bedroom so that when she looked into it she was visible only from the bosom up. She would drape her new black shawl around her shoulders, low over her breasts, and then let it fall, imagining Ray before her, imagining his face, imagining him touching her … Without your letters I would die: she wrote those words to him ten, a dozen times, and she knew they were true. But there were days she thought she would die anyway, in spite of the letters, in spite of the kindness of Aunt Alice and Uncle Ralph, in spite of the tea tray and the flowers and the weekly allowance and the sunlight bursting through the clouds. There were days—or, more often, nights, when, wide awake, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking. There was one night in particular when her aunt and uncle were out late at a concert, and she was home alone. She crept down to the balcony and sat smoking in the dark, wrapped in her wool bathrobe. She could just glimpse the moon, blurry with fog, through the trees on Laguna Street. She sat there a long time, looking at it, keeping her mind blank, and was startled when people emerged from the house across the street—guests leaving a late party, talking and laughing on the front steps. When they were gone, the lights in the house went out, one by one. She thought she had never seen anything so bleak in her life as the slow darkening of that house, and when the lights were all extinguished she became aware that tears were rolling down her cheeks.
In late September, her aunt arranged for her to meet with a social worker from Catholic Charities who would arrange for the baby’s adoption. Peggy took a streetcar and then a cable car to the office on Mission Street, where she was shown into a large shabby room, empty except for a desk and two chairs in the center. At the desk was a tiny woman in a tailored brown dress like a uniform. Mrs. Fitzgerald, she introduced herself. She was very brisk. She asked Peggy about her health and the health of her parents and siblings and grandparents, and wrote down the answers on a form that she kept covered with her hand so Peggy couldn’t see it.
“And why are you giving up this baby?”
She had rehearsed her answer on the streetcar. Aunt Alice had said she would be asked. Her aunt had taken her hand and said, “Are you sure, Peggy? That you want to do this? If you really wanted to keep the baby, you know that Uncle Ralph and I would help you. You could stay out here in San Francisco, and we’d find you a job or send you back to college. And child care—maybe some kind of cooperative arrangement.”
She had recoiled in dismay from these suggestions. To stay in California, far from Ray, living a Bohemian existence in some cheap apartment with a baby on her hands—that doll in the pink dress and the brown bonnet—no friends, no life, working at a job Aunt Alice thought suitable.
“I can’t,” she had said desperately. “I can’t, I can’t. I have to go back,” and her aunt had squeezed her hand gently and said it was all right, she understood, but told her to be ready for questions from the Catholic Charities woman.
Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “I assume you’ve thought about this carefully.”
“Yes,” Peggy said. “I can’t raise it myself. I’m too young. I’m too—I have no money. I’m a college student. I have no other choice but to give it up.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald wrote at length, turned a page. “No chance of marriage?”
Peggy blushed, and had to swallow hard before she could answer. Mrs. Fitzgerald looked up from her page.
“No,” Peggy said.
The woman pursed her lips and continued to write, nodding to herself. Then she put down her pen and leaned forward, hands folded on the desk as if she were about to pray. “May I ask if you are a Catholic?”
“Yes, I—” Her voice echoed in the empty room, and she lowered it almost to a whisper. “Of course. That’s why I’m here. I’ve always been a Catholic. My whole family is Catholic.”
“I mean a practicing Catholic.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald raised her eyebrows, stared at Peggy for a moment, and picked up her pen again. Peggy kept her eyes on the woman’s small wrinkled hands. She wrote with her left; she wore a huge diamond with her wedding ring, and Peggy tried to imagine some man loving her enough to give her that ring.
Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “Now. About your associate.” It took Peggy a moment to understand that it was Ray she meant. “Can you tell me anything about his health? The health of his family members?”
She said that his father had died—of what she didn’t know. She had met his mother only a few times but she seemed in good health. He had an older brother. She knew nothing of his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins …
Mrs. Fitzgerald gave a tiny smile and said, “You don’t seem to know this young man very well.”
“Oh, I do—I mean—”
She rummaged in a drawer of her desk. “We have a form he really should fill out, since you’re so unclear about all this. W
ould it be possible to send this to him?” She held it up, white paper with spaces to fill in on two sides. Signature of father, Peggy read at the bottom.
“I’d rather not do that,” Peggy whispered.
“And why not?”
“I’d like to keep him out of this as much as I can.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald sighed and tapped one fingernail on the desk. Peggy said nothing more. She sat looking down at the purse in her lap, a wooden-handled brocade one her aunt had bought for her. Inside it was a letter from Caroline that had come that morning. “Do you think Aunt Alice and Uncle Ralph will leave you all their money?” she had written. Classes had started, she said. She hated everything but French and Medieval Lit. Her French professor was really something: tall, dark, and handsome, and he called her Mademoiselle Kair-veen in a sexy voice like Charles Boyer’s. She got an A on her first test. No mention of Ray.
“What about the future?”
Peggy looked up. “I beg your pardon?”
“You say that you and this person don’t plan to marry, but do you intend to continue to see each other?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. It was hard to know where to look. If she looked down, it seemed she was ashamed of something, and she had vowed she wouldn’t be abject and apologetic. I have done nothing wrong, she had said to herself on the streetcar. She looked Mrs. Fitzgerald in the eye. “Yes. Of course.”
“Really.”
“Yes, we—actually, we do intend to get married when I finish school and his job is more stable.” She blushed because this had never been said. And yet she knew it was true. “He’s just starting out, and I’ll be returning to school next semester.”
“You have definite plans, then.” Peggy hated the way she said it—a statement, with an undertone of disbelief, and her cold, pale eyes completely without expression.
“Yes, we do. Not right away, but—”
“Someday.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s lips twitched—in amusement or annoyance, it was hard to tell. “And what about birth control?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Mrs. Fitzgerald inclined her head toward Peggy. “Birth control, my dear. What steps do you plan to take to insure that this won’t happen again? I’ll give you a pamphlet on the rhythm method. I somehow doubt that you and your associate have abstinence in mind.” She picked up her pen again. “But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ve learned something from this experience?”
Peggy didn’t know what to say. She wanted to get up and leave, but she was afraid the adoption wouldn’t go through. Be very cooperative, Aunt Alice had said. These people can be rather moralistic. Just smile and say yes.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I have.”
“Well.” Mrs. Fitzgerald wrote something down, then looked up at Peggy with a slightly more benign expression. “That’s all we ask, isn’t it?”
“And—just one thing,” Peggy said. “My associate. I don’t think of him that way. I mean—he’s the man I love. I love him with all my heart, and he loves me.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald’s face became stern again. “Well, my goodness,” she said. “I should certainly hope so, my dear. Considering.”
She was sitting on the balcony one morning when Bernarda brought the mail up. There was a small brown-wrapped package: an Ohio postmark and Ray’s handwriting. In the same post was a letter from her mother, and she made herself open it first. Her mother hoped she was being a good girl, that she was receiving Communion regularly, and that her health was good. She enclosed a holy card with a picture of Saint Catherine of Siena, who had cut off her beautiful long hair so no man would want her.
In the package was a ring wrapped in tissue. A note said:
This will have to do for now. When things get less confusing I’ll do better. I bought it for you in this two-bit Ohio spa town because I’m feeling so blue without you tonight. Cold Springs, Ohio, and believe me that’s a good name for it. I’m getting tired of these dumpy little towns and may be changing my mind about all this travel. I’ve heard of a job here, near Columbus, and I’m thinking about it. I’ll keep you posted as to my plans. I miss you so much. It seems like years instead of months since we were together. Wear this and think of me. All my love, Ray
It was a ring enameled in sky-blue, with a border of pink flowers and green leaves, and gold letters spelling out SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS. She studied it carefully. It was basically a cheap metal band. She imagined the town—out of season in the autumn, few tourists, just trees shedding their leaves and a dusty wind blowing. A painted wooden sign pointing to the mineral springs: rotten, sulfurish water bubbling out of a hole. Ray bored to death, taking a walk down the main street, wearing his corduroy jacket, or maybe the tan cashmere sweater that looked so good on him. Thinking of her, he would step into the only store open, a gift and souvenir shop with a window full of doodads—desperate to buy her something, and this was the best they had. It was, after all, a ring. He had never given a ring to Caroline. It was cheap, but it was pretty, and it was the fact of it that was important: like his letters, the ring was more than it seemed. With difficulty—her fingers were swollen in the mornings—she put it on her engagement-ring finger and sat looking at it for a minute. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen: that ring on her finger. When she went inside she held up her hand to show Bernarda.
“Es muy bonito!”
“Gracias,” Peggy said.
“From you hahsbeend?” Bernarda asked, smiling.
“Si! Si! My husband. Very good, Bernarda.” She nodded ecstatically. She would have liked to embrace Bernarda. They stood smiling and nodding at each other, admiring the ring, and then Peggy went down the hall to her room. With difficulty, she pulled the ring off her finger and held it in her palm. Hahsbeend. The quick tears slipped down her cheeks. Pathetic, she thought. You poor pathetic girl. She put the ring away in a drawer and went out for her walk.
By October, when there were forty-nine days left unblotted on her calendar, and when she was becoming embarrassed by her ungainly shape so that walking was no longer a pleasure, and the afternoons stretched out long and blank like the mornings, Aunt Alice asked her at teatime if she would like to come to the studio and pose.
“We’d get the stove fired up nice and hot,” she said. “I know it’s hard to sit still during these last months, but you could take plenty of breaks. And we’d pay you the going rate, of course.” Aunt Alice smiled at her, sipped her tea, and said, “A pregnant model isn’t something you come across every day. We’d all love to do you. We’d consider it a rare opportunity. And it would only be for a few days—a week at most.”
Peggy stared at her. “You mean in the nude?”
“Of course in the nude.” Her aunt leaned back in her chair, still smiling, and fitted a cigarette into her ivory holder. She exhaled a long stream through her nose. “We’re all women, after all, and I promise you we’ll keep it very tasteful and modest. And anonymous. We’ll turn your head—like so.” She clamped the holder between her teeth like President Roosevelt and reached out to tilt Peggy’s chin. “After the first few minutes, you’ll absolutely forget that you don’t have your clothes on.”
“How do you know I will?”
“Oh, I’ve done a bit of it myself.” Aunt Alice tapped ashes into her special ashtray—a pair of green marble cupped hands—and her smile became reflective. “Posed for friends back in my student days. That sort of thing.”
Peggy tried to imagine her matronly aunt arranged naked in some arty pose, surrounded by students. She laughed. “Aunt Alice, I’m shocked.”
Her aunt said, “You’d be surprised at how natural it feels.”
She couldn’t imagine her aunt, but she could imagine herself: she had a vision of herself as a painting, naked, her skin gleaming, her head tipped back, her breasts lifted. She felt her heart begin to race.
“Think about it.” Her aunt put down her cigarette and smeared jam on a piece of shortbread. “
You don’t have to decide now.”
Peggy said, “No,” and pressed her hands to her heart. “I’ve already decided. I’ll do it.”
She began posing at the studio every afternoon. In the cold bathroom, she changed out of her clothes into a silk kimono supplied by Claire, and sat as they arranged her, slumped on a sofa at one end of the room by the window. “Okay, dear?” Aunt Alice would say, and Peggy would let the robe fall. “Good,” one of them would say. “Lovely. Just move that hand a little more forward on your—good. And tilt your head just—yes—up? Up a wee bit higher? Good.”
She knew her aunt’s friends better now; she was comfortable with them. And she no longer minded the smells; the nausea from earlier in her pregnancy was gone. She posed in half-hour shifts, sitting with one hand on her belly, one hand dangling, and her face turned toward the window. If she cast her eyes down she could see her hard brown nipples and the white swell of her stomach with its rivers of blue veins. Under her hand she could feel the baby move. When she saw it pushing out against her skin, a little bulge that came and went around her stretched-tight navel, she turned her eyes away again, watching the white sky and, in the distance, black and red rooftops, the Colt Tower, and the gray-green of the Bay. Out there, miles and miles distant, was Hawaii. She dreamed of going there with Ray on her honeymoon, the two of them browning in the hot sun, wearing flowers, eating fruit that dropped off trees at their feet.
Gradually, her pose would become less comfortable. Her back would begin to hurt, she would have to pee. She would hold out as long as she could, then say, “Could I take a rest?” There would be an apologetic flurry: the women plopping their brushes into jars of turpentine or water, Aunt Alice stepping back from the clay. One of them would pick up her robe and hand it to her, and they would cluster around her, telling her what a good model she was, what wonderful skin, what an expressive hand, what a good line from neck to shoulder. She would study their work—they didn’t mind. She found it less strange than usual, as if her naked pregnant body had grounded them in reality. Claire’s watercolors were quite pretty, really—all sort of misty and blue; and even Cora, though she painted in strident reds and purples, seemed to have captured something, some restless violence that Peggy understood. Her aunt’s clay sculpture was clever, the way from one angle she looked heavy and awkward and from another dreamy, graceful, catlike. It was to be called The Future.
Souvenir of Cold Springs Page 27
