by Lisa Samson
“Oh, Aunt Bel, I’m so sorry.”
“He could be kind in his own way, compared to her. Mrs. Galt got what she wanted, just not how she wanted it, but she could never get past how it happened. Why did it matter to me, being a disappointment to this woman? I still don’t know. But it did.”
“So you married Alan and that’s why you didn’t come home?”
She nods. “My dirty secret. The worst of it is, Alan didn’t care. He liked the look of me well enough, and when we were alone he seemed happy, but he never stopped talking about his future, never changed his intention to leave. And this future he described never involved a pregnant wife, never involved dragging a baby across Europe. In his future, he saw himself as free. Eventually he was.”
Before the child was even born, Alan Galt had left the country, ending up back in America after failing to become either a film director or a novelist.
“I begged him not to go. I was desperate not to be left alone with them. According to Alan, though, the marriage wasn’t valid because his father had officiated, and the ceremony—if you can call it that—was performed in the living room of the apartment, with only the old lady from upstairs as a witness. ‘What about your son?’ I asked. ‘What about your son?’ He said—and I will never forget the words, because they seemed so strange and cold. He said, ‘The baby is nonbinding.’ Just like that. Nonbinding. An unenforceable clause in an invalid contract.”
“That’s horrible.”
She shrugs. “That’s what he was like.”
Aunt Bel and her little boy lived in the cramped apartment with the Galts for almost three years. One of the responsibilities that devolved to her was typing, copying, and mailing the monthly support letters, which would include copious updates on what was happening in the field. While he never made things up wholesale, Herman had a talent for embellishing, for making his efforts sound much more considerable and much more successful than they in fact were. To pad the letters, Herman included tidbits about the family, usually phrased as requests for prayer. Pray for Mrs. Galt as she struggles with her arthritis. Pray for our son James as he prepares for graduation. Pray for our son Alan as he pursues his writing career. And Bel would have to type these notices up as if nothing were wrong. Never once was her existence mentioned in the support letters, never once was her child acknowledged.
Then the Galts went home on sabbatical and decided not to come back. They never called Aunt Bel, never wrote. She discovered the news when the building manager informed her that she would have to move out of the apartment. The lady upstairs took her and the boy in. That lasted until the lady became quite sick and, after almost a year, died.
“By this time, my Russian was pretty good, and so was my Kazakh. You never really attain fluency, picking it up so late, but I could get by all right. After the old lady died, I took my son and went to Uralsk, where there were still missionaries. There was … a cloud over me, but they were kind. They helped when they could, and I would translate for some of them.”
“Aunt Bel, did you ever consider coming home?”
Her nervous laugh sounds just like my mom’s. “I never did. This was no longer a place that existed for me. Maybe that’s hard to understand, but no. I was ashamed of what had happened to me—of what I’d let happen—and I knew that Herman had made up a story for the missionaries in Almaty about why I wasn’t going back, a story that didn’t include unwanted pregnancies and shotgun weddings. I said before there were two Belindas, the real one and the one Alan made, but really there were three, because one of them I’d left behind here.”
“So you really were a missionary, then.”
“No, Sara. I was a runaway who found herself in the company of missionaries. That is a big difference.”
We have left the park behind, and now we walk down the amber-lit streets past darkened storefronts and bright porches and lines of parked cars along every curb. All this time she has never mentioned the child by name, the boy in the picture she carries with her, or explained where he is right now, or what happened to him.
“Your son,” I say. “What was his name?”
She tilts her head, listening to the sound of our feet tapping the pavement. “I called him Michael,” she says, as if he might have been named something else on paper. My mind goes there, imagining the indignity of the Galts imposing a name on her newborn child. Alan Junior. Herman II. I don’t even have the heart to ask.
We have turned a corner and now the Grove Street Artisan is in sight, and a few blocks farther lies home. Part of me wants to pass it by and keep walking, and part of me wants this to end. Aunt Bel’s story sits across my shoulders like a heavy weight. I’m not sure how much more I can bear.
“Did … something happen to Michael?”
“Yes,” she says, but she adds nothing.
She’s told me so much, yet left so much unsaid.
But I keep my questions to myself. Asking any more of her now would be cruel.
“You were gone for hours,” Finn says, plopping onto the bed. “And when you got back, it was like you were in a trance. Did you find out what the deal is with the foreign guy?”
I blink a few times, then pull my T-shirt down over my head, crawling under the turned-back covers. “Not really, no. She doesn’t want me to see him, I know that. She said he was dangerous—”
“For real?”
I nod. “Finn, she opened up about her past, and it’s much worse than I imagined. I knew there was something … but not like this.”
He rolls toward me, propping himself up on his elbow. “What did she say?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you. She made it sound like she was telling me in confidence. But if you want me to—”
“No,” he says. “That’s probably for the best. If she wants to tell me, she can do it herself. I know her, so I don’t have to know everything about her, if you see what I mean. Just go to sleep. You look pretty beat.”
I am pretty beat. But it’s hard to imagine getting any sleep.
Long after Finn snores contently beside me, I roll out of bed and go to the dresser, opening the jewelry box where I keep my grandmother’s cocktail ring and the little porcelain figure Aunt Bel gave me her first day here. I hide it there because the face’s pearlescent craquelure patina reminds me of the veins of a vampire, a dark web of lines visible beneath pale skin. Bringing it back to bed, I set the doll upright on my chest, letting her back rest against the crest of the covers. That’s how I saw the doll when she first gave it to me. I imagined throwing it away and waking to find it sitting like a succubus on my chest.
“You don’t scare me anymore,” I say to the doll.
There’s nothing frightening about the little voodoo doll now. She just makes me deeply sad, like Michael’s photograph makes me sad, knowing all the pain those tiny eyes have witnessed.
“Sara, are you all right?”
Holly Ringwald sits across the table from me, her butter croissant broken in two on a plate. Introducing her to the Grove Street Artisan, she told me, was a blessing and a curse. I know exactly what she means. I have the glistening fingers and the flake-covered plate to prove it. After watching her warm up to Madge, I can imagine Holly telling all her society friends about this place. We’ll be swarmed by suburbanites.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Seemed like you were a million miles away just now.”
I give her my self-conscious, apologetic smile, knowing I must have been staring out the window again, still processing the story Aunt Bel told me last night. Even though Holly liked the work I sent her yesterday so much that she insisted on a face-to-face meeting, I can barely take in the praise, or even reconnect with the anticipation I felt less than twenty-four hours ago when I clicked the Send button. Somehow, after a taste of Aunt Bel’s history, making things beautiful doesn’t excite me so much.
“That’s a beautiful ring,” she says. “May I?”
I slip my grandmother’s cocktail ring off my finger—returnin
g the porcelain doll to the jewelry box this morning, I decided to wear it today. Holly holds it up to the light and talks about her admiration of vintage jewelry. She loves Art Deco pieces especially, even though she doesn’t wear them. Not her style.
“How do you like something if it’s not your style?”
“What I appreciate is the architecture. The way the jewelry reflects the design ethos of the period, the same way the buildings did. I used to be an architect. You didn’t know that? Must be why I love what you’re doing so much. The design process fascinates me. You’re working hands-on, you know, but with abstractions. It’s the perfect combination of the head and the hand.” She holds the ring out.
“Yes,” I say, slipping it back on my finger.
Her eyes take on a dreamy look. “The thing I loved most in my architecture program was making models of everything. You’d start with nothing, then you’d have your drawings, your blueprints—but it was the model that made it start to feel real. I still have some of the ones I made. I couldn’t part with them.”
It’s nice of her to keep this one-sided conversation going. Nice of her to let me sit here and listen, smiling, nodding, enjoying the company of a woman a lot like myself. I remember thinking when we first met that she was the anti-Bel, an assured, self-confident woman, a success. Now I realize it wasn’t being Aunt Bel’s opposite that drew me to her; it was how similar she is to me. Or at least, to my idea of myself. Holly is, in a lot of ways, what I hope someday to become. Holly Ringwald. What a name!
“Do people give you grief about the Molly Ringwald thing?” I ask.
“All the time. Thank goodness I like The Breakfast Club or it would drive me bonkers. Of course, I knew what I was getting into when I married Eric.”
“The things we do for love.”
“Amen, sister. But it worked out right for you, didn’t it? The former Miss Sara O’Hara.”
“Did I tell you that?”
“It was probably Finn. Or maybe Rick. You can see why it would stick in my head.”
“What made you give up architecture? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Honestly? I wasn’t as good at what I loved as you are. When I met Eric, I was doing the worst kind of grunt work at one of the big firms. Designing suburban strip malls. Design isn’t even the right word. It’s assembly line work, pure and simple. In school, I always imagined myself doing skyscrapers and museums and public buildings. I could imagine whole cities in my head, everything laid out just so. But you’d be surprised how few architects get to do that kind of work. Eventually, I got to where I hated it. One day Eric looked at me and said, ‘If you hate it so much, just quit.’ And I thought, ‘Is that me? Am I a quitter?’ I really struggled with that. I’d always been raised with a put-your-hand-to-the-plow-and-don’t-look-back work ethic. Work is like marriage. You don’t stop just because you fell out of love.”
“Marriage is work,” I say.
“Exactly. Fortunately for me, I could never convince Eric that doing a job you hate just because it’s your job makes sense. I finally quit, and after toying with interior design for a while, this thing opened up at The Community. An opportunity to give back.”
The thing she leaves unspoken is, it’s easier to quit your job when you don’t need the money. That’s a luxury not all of us can afford. But I don’t like Holly any less for having a husband made of money. If Finn were rich, I’d probably lie on the couch all day eating buttered popcorn. Holly invests herself when she doesn’t have to. I admire that about her.
But then I think, would I? Really? What kind of an existence would that be? People think it would be the key to happiness. But I’m not so sure.
Since we’re mixing work and pleasure, she starts asking me about the Microchurch, how things are going, how I feel about the experiment. It’s hard to know how to answer, since she works at The Community, the church that seems to have inspired so much of Rick’s and Finn’s thinking, though not in a good way.
“You should check it out sometime,” I tell her, trying to be diplomatic.
“And how is your aunt settling in? I don’t see her at the Firehouse much anymore.”
“After the accident with her finger, we’ve been keeping her away from the machinery.”
“Has she gotten more comfortable being back? I got the sense she was having some challenges getting back up to speed. After twenty years on the mission field, I guess that’s not surprising.”
“She has a lot to work through.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve never actually met a real-life missionary before, so I don’t know what experiences are typical. I’m pretty sure, though, that hers weren’t. There’s a lot of … unhappiness, I think.”
“And that makes you uncomfortable.”
I have to pause and think about that. Am I sending unconscious signals again?
“Not uncomfortable,” I say. “But if you’d asked me before she came whether I was happy or not, I think I would have said, ‘I’m on my way.’ It’s something you have to work at, you know? Like marriage. When I see people who aren’t happy—the answer seems pretty obvious: they’re not working at it.”
“Bad choices equal bad results.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“And now you’re not so sure?”
I struggle to answer, not knowing how to put my feelings into words. “I guess what I’m saying is … I can understand happiness as something you possess, and I can understand the absence of happiness, like a hole of contentment waiting to be filled. If that’s all it is—a hole to fill—I can get my head around that. The thing that worries me with my aunt is that maybe unhappiness isn’t a hole, maybe it’s not an absence. What worries me is that it might be a presence.” The presence I’ve felt in the room with me—for how long, I don’t really know. What if it isn’t an imaginary friend? What if it isn’t the Holy Spirit? Suppose the presence in the room when I’m all alone is a form of unhappiness? “Something with roots and a whole history, something you can’t banish with a little behavior modification …”
I can tell Holly follows my meaning. She leans forward, holding her breath, nodding unconsciously as the words come out. When my voice trails off, she sinks back in her chair, looking spent.
“Something with roots,” she says. “I know what you mean. As if happiness isn’t something to be attained. It’s more about banishing unhappiness, or at least the reasons for it.” The way she says it throws all my assumptions about Holly into doubt, and I can see that the questions that kept me up last night have cost her many more hours of sleep than I could have imagined. This abstraction of mine, unhappiness, is something she has worked with hands-on, something she knows from personal experience.
“You know what?” she says, lightening the mood with a forced smile. “We’re gonna be best girlfriends, you and I. I can tell already. We’re on the same wavelength, Sara. I resonate with the way you think.”
Her convertible is parked on the street outside, the top down in honor of the glorious weather. I watch her strap in, fire up the engine, and pull away, waving until she turns around the corner, her hair, red today like mine, blowing in the wind. And I can’t shake the feeling that Holly doesn’t have things together after all. Of course she doesn’t, I tell myself. Nobody does. But once you’ve tried someone on as a role model, it isn’t easy coming to realize they might just need a role model as well.
14.
Thy Hand, Belinda
Back at the studio, paint fumes thicken the air while my mind is still buzzing with thoughts about my conversation with Holly. We put the whole happiness equation on its head, and I’m wondering what to do with it. Huey stands across the counter with his hands on his hips, peering at the Iron Maiden’s pieces arranged on the floor in a more or less symmetrical grid, a real-life exploded diagram. Stepping between them with a paintbrush in hand, Finn daubs patches of British racing green onto primed iron here and there, tapping the brush against the metal as gently as a queen du
bbing a knight. The paint drips onto the plastic sheeting underneath—and where there is no sheeting, onto the studio’s waxed wood floor.
“Is that the best way to do that?” I ask.
“I’m painting swatches to see if we like the color.”
I didn’t ask him what he was doing. But whatever.
Finn fumbles the brush and it drops through the curved spokes of the flywheel, landing on the plastic with a wet smack. He fetches the brush, sets it across an open paint can, and nearly kicks the can over as he picks his way back to the perimeter of the field of Iron Maiden parts.
“Well,” he says, surveying his work. “What does everybody think?”
Huey looks my way. He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s thinking. I already know. He’ll have stood there watching the whole process, inwardly cringing at Finn’s every move. Even if he didn’t lecture my husband on the right way of going about things, I’m sure the speech was running in his head. He is one of those perfectionists who can’t abide any outcome, no matter how good it is, if the process of getting there wasn’t to his liking.
I find the green swatches quite nice, though, much better than the bald iron. “I like it. Let’s go with the green.”
“Hold that thought, though,” Finn says, bending down to open another can. He dips a fresh brush into bright red paint, leaving a trail of blood-like droplets behind as he works his way back, streaking new blazes of crimson next to the still-damp green marks.
“Kind of looks like Christmas,” Huey says.
Diana hangs up the phone and leans across the counter for a better look. “The red’s not dark enough. It looks kind of pinkish.”
“It’ll dry darker,” Finn says. “I hope.”
Huey smirks. “Or, hey, just go with that. Big ol’ bright pink printing press in the middle of the floor. That’ll catch a lot of eyes.”
“Don’t laugh,” I say. “It probably would.”
“What’s wrong with pink?” Diana asks. “This place could use a feminine touch—”
