Blood Rubies

by McDowell, Michael

  “Marsha,” Andrea protested, “I didn’t even take the ride, and you’re making me sick.”

  Pale-faced, the boys shook their heads.

  “Why don’t we walk around for a little, and then we’ll just drive on home. How’s that?” said Andrea, smiling.

  “Can we play the Superman pinball machine? I won two games on it in Evanston, I bet they have one here,” said one of the boys—Andrea couldn’t remember which was Andrew and which Michael.

  “Sure,” said Marsha. “Here’s three Susan B’s, if you put one of those in, you get five games to the dollar. When that’s gone, we go too. Right?”

  The boys took the coins and disappeared into the long, low-ceilinged wooden arcade that stank of popcorn and machine oil.

  Andrea and Marsha left the boardwalk and crossed the parking lot to the sea wall, seating themselves there on one of the three benches that hadn’t recently been vandalized. The wind from the ocean had obliterated all the morning’s warmth. They crossed their arms, wishing they had brought jackets, and squinted into the strong sea breeze. As they sat silent, the sky became darker and the cloud cover was perceptibly lowered.

  “It’s going to start raining any minute,” said Andrea. “Maybe we should get Michael and Andrew and go.”

  “I don’t believe in rain until it’s soaked my T-shirt,” said Marsha. “Let’s wait a few minutes.”

  A line of young children filed before Andrea and Marsha, and the two young women exchanged amused glances, for the students were hardly dressed for an outing at Nantasket Beach. The four boys wore white short-sleeved shirts with butterfly collars and dark blue pressed shorts, while the two girls wore jumpers of the same blue, and white blouses with puffed sleeves. Behind the children was a young nun carrying a shopping bag filled with small sand pails and little metal shovels. She was so preoccupied with the maintenance of order in her group that she did not spare even a glance for the two young women on the bench.

  Andrea pulled a comb from her back pocket and ran it through her hair several times with difficulty. “God,” she complained, “sea air gives me the kinks. Here we are, sophomores at a Seven Sisters school, and what are we doing with our summer when everyone we know is on an archaeological dig in southern France, or mountain climbing in Yugoslavia? We’re on Nantasket Beach! I don’t know why I let you drag me along.”

  Marsha didn’t reply. She had looked thoughtfully after the nun and her six charges; after a moment, she turned back to her friend with a disturbed expression.

  “What’s wrong now?” asked Andrea.

  “That nun,” said Marsha, cocking her head toward the retreating group.

  “Yes,” said Andrea, glancing toward the black-robed woman, “that’s a nun, all right.”

  Marsha touched Andrea’s arm. “Didn’t you see?”

  “See what? She looked like a penguin? All nuns look like penguins.”

  “No,” said Marsha, her fingers tightening on Andrea’s arm, “she didn’t look like a penguin, she looked like you.”

  “You got dizzy watching that roller coaster.”

  “I’m serious, Andrea. I swear to God, she looks just like you.”

  Annoyed, Andrea stood up and jammed the comb into her back pocket. “Why is everybody always saying I look like somebody else?”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “That guy I went home with—”

  “Which of the multitude?” said Marsha sarcastically.

  “The one from Joanna’s party,” replied Andrea, “that you thought was so gorgeous. My first—remember? The next morning he showed me this picture in an old newspaper of a girl he thought I looked like. Somebody killed her father or something and she had horrible hair, and she was wearing this completely tacky middy blouse, for God’s sake. Why doesn’t anybody tell me I look like Faye Dunaway or Candice Bergen? Instead they point out this cluck who looks like she hasn’t had her period yet, or a goddamned nun with a shopping bag. Besides, I looked at that nun, I don’t look a thing like her.”

  Marsha ignored Andrea’s irritation and stood. “Come on then, and see for yourself.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Andrea.” Marsha lowered her voice and said seriously. “I swear to God, that nun did look like you. Let’s just check her out, and then you can say ‘I told you so.’ ”

  With a nod, Andrea reluctantly acquiesced. Marsha hurried her down the boardwalk. The nun and her brood were stopped at a water fountain, the young woman lifting each of the children by turn; the children seemed oddly docile and quiet. Andrea and Marsha stood a discreet distance away and pretended to be in casual conversation as they glanced sidewise at the nun. Andrea kept her hand against the side of her face to disguise her interest. The increasing wind billowed the nun’s black skirts and fluttered the veil about her shoulders; at times the child in her arms was altogether lost behind a flap of black cloth.

  “I feel stupid,” said Andrea, “spying on a nun.”

  “Her eyes are green, just like yours, and look at that nose. It’s the shape of her face too,” said Marsha, “it’s exactly the same. Remember when I took Life Drawing class and I was using you for a model all the time? Well, I know what you look like, Andrea, I know every line in your face—and that nun has them all, I promise you, she has every line.”

  “Marsha, she’s wearing about fifty yards of black material, she’s got a wimple to her eyebrows, no makeup, and her head’s probably shaved bald under there—how can you say she looks like me?! She’s got green eyes and I’ve got green eyes and that’s it! I look at my face in the mirror for about two hours every day, and I know what I look like—”

  “No,” exclaimed Marsha, “you don’t! In the mirror, you’re seeing your face backward. The mirror image is not what other people see. That’s why you think she doesn’t look like you, because you’re thinking of your mirror image, you’re not thinking of what you really look like. When I look at you, you know what I see?”

  “What?”

  “That nun over there. That nun over there is you at a Halloween party. I just wish she’d laugh, so we could see her teeth.”

  “Oh, Marsha!” Andrea cried loudly.

  The nun looked up, but the two young women turned smoothly away and were not seen. The last child in line was set down, and the first one tugged at her skirts. “Can I please have some more, Sister Katherine?” Sister Katherine gathered the child in her arms.

  Heavy drops of rain began to fall. Thunder exploded across the sky, drowning even the amplified carnival music of the amusement arcade across the way. The eyes of six children widened, and they stared about nervously, mouths agape. Tentacles of lightning struck through the sky over Hingham. Thunder again blasted overhead. The boy in the nun’s arms flinched and cried out.

  “Shhh, Patrick,” said Sister Katherine, “don’t be afraid, it’s only the hammers of heaven, that’s all it is.”

  Gnarled fingers of lightning thrust down into the churning ocean as one peal of thunder crowded the growling end of the last before it. The children quaked, hovering at the nun’s skirts, and she scurried them up the walk. The boy in her arms burrowed his face into her black shoulder. “Hurry, hurry, let’s run,” cried Sister Katherine. “God is angry, He’s driving in His biggest nails today!”

  Andrea and Marsha watched fascinated. The nun, her skirts and veil billowing and flashing black and white, ran past them with her chicks toward a Volkswagen bus in the parking lot. They were joined by another nun, who ran across from the amusement park. The children beat upon the doors of the locked vehicle.

  “Hush! Hush!” cried Sister Katherine, “it’s only the hammers of heaven! They’ll never hurt you! We’ll be back in Hingham in ten minutes! Hush, hush!”

  Sheets of rain beat against the top of the bus, and the nun herded the children safely in
side.

  Andrea and Marsha rushed through the pounding rain to the shelter of the arcade.

  19

  That night Andrea stood before the framed mirror in her room. In her hands she held a large copy of her graduation photograph. Her eyes went back and forth from her reflection to the glossy print. As Marsha had said, the images were not the same. But when she turned the photograph to the mirror, they realigned themselves. What she saw in the mirror was not, after all, what other people saw when they looked at her.

  Andrea tossed the photograph on the bureau and from a lower drawer took out her makeup mirror. She held it at arm’s length and then looked into the wall mirror at the double reflection of herself in the hand mirror. As Andrea studied herself she thought again of what Marsha had said. She observed herself both in profile and full face; she tilted the mirror up and down, she stretched her neck, she lowered her chin; and she concluded that she was looking at a different woman. She shuddered with a sudden sense of alienation—alienation from her own body. What she saw in this doubly reflected image, her true image, was not Andrea LoPonti, Wenham sophomore and graduate of Miss Britten’s Academy, but rather the young nun on Nantasket Beach, and the girl in the newspaper photograph whose father had been knifed to death in a lower-class suburb.

  This realization disturbed Andrea for several days afterward—and in a manner she could not control. Andrea rarely remembered her dreams, and had never thought them important. But through the years, a single figure had sporadically haunted her nights: it was Andrea herself. Not Andrea as she was, bright and popular, applauded and awarded—but Andrea as she feared she really was, Andrea as Andrea would be if she ever dropped her defenses. In Andrea’s dreams was a girl who was green-eyed and blond and pretty enough, but who crept into corners and wouldn’t speak above a whisper, who abased herself before all others, who hadn’t stamina or backbone or anything to say for herself. Andrea told herself that this figure was, of course, the frightened portion of herself, the portion that she had never allowed to gain the upper hand; but now that hapless figure of a girl—no, not a girl anymore, but a young woman—became suddenly more prominent in Andrea’s dreams. In the morning, Andrea could never remember in what scenes that retiring creature had played her contemptible part, but was left only with the bitter reflection that this was perhaps her true self.

  Andrea knew that this girl, who had inhabited her head at night for as long as she could remember, was the goad that had propelled her always toward achievement, popularity, and personal power. But never before had this dream-girl been so prominent, never had she shown up so many nights in a row, never with such clarity. When Andrea woke in the morning, it was with some phrase the girl had spoken beating in her brain.

  One day, when Andrea had been several hours alone, she admitted something to herself: that the anger she had displayed toward Derek and Marsha for pointing up the physical resemblances between her and the girl in the picture and the nun on the beach had the same source. She too had seen the resemblances—and worse, she had felt them. And in those moments when she had looked at the photograph of the girl consoling her mother, and surreptitiously stared between the fingers of her hand at the nun on the boardwalk, she had had the unmistakable sensation of just having waked from sleep—with the fading, unintelligible words of that other girl echoing in her brain.

  On the evening before Andrea was to return to Wenham for the fall semester, the three LoPontis sat together in the den during the evening news. Cosmo was in his recliner with a glass of the imported Japanese beer that Andrea had tried to convince him was so much better than the Budweiser he really preferred. Vittoria was on the couch, clipping newspaper recipes. Andrea sat stiffly apart from them in an overstuffed armchair that she had deliberately pulled out of the range of the television screen.

  “Is something wrong, Andrea?” asked Vittoria. “Something’s always wrong when you cross your arms that way.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cosmo lowered the volume on the television by remote control.

  “Are you ill, or—”

  “No, I’m not ill.”

  “Well you don’t look yourself, I—”

  Vittoria was interrupted by her daughter’s harsh laughter.

  “Well,” said Andrea, “I guess that’s it. I don’t feel like myself, either.”

  “Cosmo,” said Vittoria, “turn off the television.” Father and mother looked to their daughter for explanation.

  When, after a long pause, she had not spoken, Vittoria gently prodded: “Are you worried about going back to school tomorrow, Andrea? I know it’s—”

  “No, Mother, I certainly haven’t been worried about school. No, Mother,” she said, laying an ironic emphasis on the word. “I was thinking about my relatives.”

  “Your relatives!”

  “I’ve been wondering why I’ve never met any of them. I mean, we must have some relatives. All Italians have relatives. I’ve never even seen my grandparents.”

  “Yes, you have,” said Vittoria uneasily. “You were just too little to remember.”

  “When was that?”

  “When you were in Texas,” said Cosmo.

  Andrea stared at her father. “Texas? When was I in Texas?”

  Vittoria grimaced at her husband, then turned to Andrea. “You were born in Texas, Andrea. I thought you knew that,” she added lamely. “When I . . .” Vittoria cast about for her thoughts. “When I was pregnant with you,” she went on at last, “I went to visit your grandmother in Texas. She was very sick. She died, and the next day you were born.”

  “You flew to Texas when you were nine months pregnant?” asked Andrea. “I didn’t think they allowed that.”

  Vittoria looked confused. “You were premature,” she said at last. “I think you came early because of . . . because of everything that happened around then.”

  Andrea pondered this. “Then my birth certificate says I was born in Texas?”

  Cosmo and Vittoria exchanged glances. “You don’t have a birth certificate,” said Cosmo at last.

  Andrea pursed her lips and waited for an explanation.

  “There was one, of course,” said Vittoria weakly, “but we lost it, and when we wrote to get another, we discovered that the city hall in Texas had burned and a lot of the records were lost. We had—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Andrea, with an unpleasant curling of her lip. “Just cut this out.”

  “Cut what out?” asked her mother.

  “All this bullshit.”

  “Andrea!”

  “All this bullshit!” she repeated forcefully. “You’re making it up as you go along! The fact is, I’m adopted, right?”

  Stunned, Cosmo and Vittoria said nothing.

  “Right,” said Andrea. “I’m adopted, and you never said a word. I’m such an idiot. I look at you two there, and I look at myself in the mirror, and we don’t look anything alike, and it never even occurs to me there might be a reason for it.”

  “Andrea . . .” her mother pleaded.

  “Why did you lie?”

  “We didn’t lie!” cried Cosmo, but turned his face away.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me I was adopted?”

  “Do you really want to know?” asked Vittoria.

  Andrea’s smile was merely ironic. “Yes,” she replied,“I guess I do. Tell me, Mother, why did you hold it back for twenty years that I was adopted? Why did you and Daddy decide never to tell me?”

  “Because,” said Vittoria, “you weren’t adopted. We found you.”

  Now Andrea was stunned. “I was found? Like on the doorstep or something? In a basket, with a note? And a locket around my neck?”

  “No,” said Vittoria, “with an earring—”

  “Don’t!” interrupted Cosmo. Startled, both women turned
to him. Andrea nervously pulled at her right earlobe and the ruby chip embedded in it. Cosmo spoke haltingly: “Don’t say anything more, Vitti. It won’t do her any good to know any more.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Vitti found you,” said Andrea’s father. “And we kept you because we couldn’t have any children of our own. Andrea, you were a gift from God. We couldn’t—”

  “Who were my real parents?”

  Vittoria shook her head. “Andrea, listen, the only reason we never told you all this is not because we didn’t think you could handle it emotionally, it was just because it wasn’t . . . What we did wasn’t legal. Cosmo and I never told anyone, we were so afraid that someone would take you away from us. We couldn’t tell you because we were afraid you’d tell somebody else, by accident of course, and the story would get out. We couldn’t take the risk, we—”

  “Who would I have told?” screamed Andrea. “My God, I—”

  “Andrea,” cried her mother. “You can’t let this make a difference, you can’t—”

  “It does, though!” shouted Andrea, jerking up out of the chair. “It makes all the difference in the world!”

  20

  Marsha saw him first. She and Andrea had been sitting for half an hour at the bar of the dance room in the Brimmer House, watching all the arrivals and tentative couplings in the smoked mirror behind the tiers of fancy liquors. When the man stepped through the door, Marsha nudged Andrea with her elbow and discreetly nodded at his reflection.

  He was tall and slender, in his late twenties. His features were darkly handsome and just irregular enough to be interesting; his dark eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded beneath thick black brows. His hair, in short, tight, thick curls, appeared blue-black as he stood on the perimeter of a circle of amber light. The shadow of a beard defined his square jaw. He wore a snugly fitting and evidently new brown leather jacket over a black T-shirt, tight straight-legged, button-fly jeans, and heavy black leather boots. In his large hands he turned a shiny black motorcycle helmet with a mirrored visor. In this place given over to junior executives and administrative assistants, he was a forceful and threatening anomaly.