Gypsy Sins

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  McGuire stood and walked with his hands in his pockets to the fireplace. The logs had crumbled into cinders. “I don’t understand how you discovered where he was, your son I mean. And where he was buried.”

  Her voice from behind, clear and assertive, spun him around to stare at her.

  “I killed him.”

  McGuire breathed deeply several times. “You want to tell me about that?” he asked.

  Another sad smile, this one unforced and self-mocking. “I’ve been wanting to tell someone for years. Perhaps if I told you it might help me. And it might explain Parker’s . . . Parker’s and my relationship.” She shrugged. “If Parker tried to enlist you to follow me, he must trust you a great deal. Parker has difficulty trusting anyone. With good reason.” She held out her empty glass. “Would you pour me another sherry?” she asked. “And perhaps you should pour one for yourself. I’m glad . . .” The hand with the empty sherry glass dropped abruptly. “I’m glad I can finally tell somebody. Somebody who might even be able to offer some advice.”

  “I’m not very good with advice,” McGuire told her.

  “Let me tell you anyway,” she said. “But please. Please pour me another sherry. And please stay and listen to me. I need to talk right now.”

  The daylight faded with the fire while June Leedale divulged part of her soul to McGuire, word by word revealing a woman who had denied the truth for decades. In spite of the pain her face almost shone with relief and release during the telling, as though a veil were being lifted.

  She told of the panic that exploded within her when she discovered she was pregnant. There had been no one to turn to, no one to confide in. She tried to contact Sonny by telephone, calling all the advertising agencies in Boston until she found one who recognized the name Charles Tate. But Mr. Tate, the agency informed her, was on a training course in upstate New York. Would she like him to call her upon his return?

  She left her name but he never called.

  “What would I have said to him if he had?” she asked McGuire. “Asked him to marry me? And be an anchor to him for the rest of his life? We could never have been happy. Not for long. Why should I ruin two lives?”

  An abortion was out of the question in the early sixties. There had been rumours of a doctor in Falmouth who aborted teenage girls for a fee of several thousand dollars. “I didn’t have the money. My parents could have sacrificed, I suppose, but . . .”

  So she kept her secret to herself throughout the summer. Choosing not to join her friends, those who remained in town for the summer, on the beaches or in the parks or at the summer dances. Reading books alone in her room overlooking the sea. Eating junk foods to gain weight and disguise her condition. Telling her disappointed parents that she had decided not to go to college, at least not right away. Perhaps next year. Perhaps after a vacation in Europe. Knowing she must eventually confront an event as inevitable as death and not knowing how to deal with it. How to endure it. How to salvage her life from its ruins.

  Until Labour Day when school friends who had been touring Europe or working at New England resorts returned home for a final visit before college.

  “Parker came back from Maine where he had spent the summer planting trees. He’d changed. He was tanned and muscular and looked . . . looked handsome.”

  Throughout high school, June and Parker had never dated. Their personalities, June explained, were in such sharp contrast. She was active and outgoing, she loved to dance, she laughed easily. Parker was scholarly and withdrawn. But by the end of that summer their personalities were virtually reversed. June remained in her house or took long walks alone, avoiding friends and lost in the agony of her secret. In comparison, Parker had gained confidence in himself and shed his introverted nature.

  “I added some weight by then,” she told McGuire. “I even developed a bust, and that brought me whistles from boys in cars and construction workers. Which was another reason I rarely went out during the day.”

  She folded her arms, crossed her legs and avoided McGuire’s eyes. “Parker and I met the evening he came home from Maine. I was sitting on the bench across from the lighthouse, the same bench where I had met Sonny a couple of months earlier. Wallowing in my memories, my self-pity. Parker had bought a car that very day with money he earned in Maine. He drove down to the lighthouse and saw me there. We talked about his summer job and about who was going to what college, and the next day we took a long drive down the Cape. We had such fun. He told me about his plans, how he wouldn’t stay on the Cape, how he would practice law perhaps in Boston or in New York. He began to sound like Sonny, expanding his horizons, intent on making his mark.”

  Her loneliness, her desperation, her need for love of any kind, together with Parker’s newfound assurance, led inevitably to the rear seat of Parker’s car on their third date and a long afternoon in her bedroom the next day while her parents were away on a weekend visit with relatives.

  From his Harvard dormitory room Parker called June each evening, and she relished the joy and satisfaction in his voice. On his weekend returns to the Cape they made love in her bedroom or in a rented tourist cabin, rushing together with the hunger of adolescent passion, free spirits in a newly free land.

  “Parker became my escape and security,” she told McGuire. “I didn’t plot it. I didn’t manipulate him. It simply happened.”

  By late October she was no longer able to disguise her condition, and one evening, while sitting together on a swing in the garden of her parents’ house, she told him she was pregnant. Her mother had challenged her earlier that day, and when June admitted the truth she replied to her mother’s next question, the inevitable one, with Parker’s name. Because he was the only person she had been seeing. And because she had almost persuaded herself that it might, after all, be Parker’s child. A part of it must be. One night of fantasy with Sonny Tate, the now invisible Sonny Tate, could not have diverted her life so abruptly, so decisively from its natural course. But all of the lovemaking with Parker, in all of those locations, surely must have qualified him for something, for some degree of responsibility.

  “I never lied to Parker. I never told him he was the father,” she said to McGuire. “He simply made the assumption. Does that make me less guilty? Less manipulative maybe?”

  McGuire sat silently, waiting for her to continue. Or to end her story abruptly and retreat with her secrets into a sullen space again. But she went on, fueling her tale with sips of sherry.

  “It would have meant the end of Parker’s career, the death of all his dreams, to marry me. Because that’s what you did back then, wasn’t it? Abortion was simply not an issue. Legally, morally, ethically, it just didn’t exist for people like us. You married each other, whether you should or not. That child, that uninvited creature growing inside you, became the bond of your relationship. The only reason for the relationship. There was no other choice.”

  Except secrecy and adoption.

  “Parker was prepared to do the right thing. That’s what he said to me. He would do the right thing. Stand with me through the scandal, marry me, abandon his law studies. Maybe work as a legal clerk somewhere and finish his degree at night school. We would scrimp and save for years and endure the disapproval of our families.” She breathed in deeply, released it slowly. “It all seemed so tragic, so unnecessary. So I told Parker I wouldn’t do that. I told him I would move to my aunt’s house in Springfield, have the baby there, give it up for adoption and return home and tell our friends I had been touring Europe or wherever. It’s what pregnant teenage girls did back then. And he agreed. With a long sigh of relief, he agreed.”

  And so she moved to her aunt’s home. Parker visited her in Springfield once a month, gave her a plain gold ring at Christmas, sent flowers on Valentine’s Day and stayed overnight in a guest room during his infrequent visits. All the while avoiding the disapproving gaze of June’s maiden aunt, an office manager with a
stationery supplies firm. During the day, June remained inside her aunt’s house, reading books by the light from her second floor bedroom window and feeling the movement of the child within her. Sonny’s child.

  Soon after the New Year, she revealed the truth to her aunt and enlisted her to play a role in the necessary deceit. The child would arrive at the end of March. A full-term baby would reveal the lie to Parker, whom June now believed she loved. And who, she was convinced, loved her in return. She told herself that when it was all over they would forget, each of them, she forgetting the deception, Parker forgetting that he had impregnated and partially abandoned her, and they would spend their lives together as though this temporary deception never occurred.

  Her aunt, beyond shock by now, agreed to join the conspiracy. Her niece, unmarried, had slept with two young men, an outrageous deed in her aunt’s eyes. But guilty as her niece might be, June’s aunt considered the young men themselves far more guilty, wild animals driven by unbridled lust. June, her aunt determined, would pay for her sin with pain and humiliation. So it was not unreasonable to expect one of the young men to pay for his participation by suffering a little chicanery.

  It was her aunt who arranged for the adoption of the unborn child. It was her aunt who contacted the lawyer who recruited a childless couple as his clients. It was the lawyer who prepared the legal papers for June and her aunt to sign, transferring custody of the baby to the unnamed couple in return for medical and legal expenses. And it was June’s signature on the agreement that added another link in a chain that would stretch across three decades.

  June Leedale’s tale was leading her into the corner of her soul that held the darkest secrets of her past and her words gained momentum, propelled by an avalanche of emotions. Listening to her, McGuire suspected she would continue to speak whether he or anyone else was in the room to hear.

  “When the baby was born,” she went on, “my aunt called Parker in Boston and told him I had suffered a miscarriage, that there had been difficulties, but that I would be all right. It was how we agreed to cover things.”

  Parker Leedale responded with concern and jubilation at the news. Concern over June’s plight, knowing a miscarriage so late in a pregnancy could be dangerous; jubilation that there would be no ghost to haunt them, no living presence to torment them through the rest of their lives together. He sent flowers and promised to visit her the following weekend.

  “As soon as he was born I insisted on holding the baby, just once,” she said. “In the hospital.” She stared into the dead fire as though speaking to someone behind the mantel. “When I held him, I saw Sonny in every detail of his face. Then they took him from me and rushed me into the operating room.”

  Complications had developed during the delivery and June began to hemorrhage. It was a serious situation demanding immediate attention and drastic measures. But the small town hospital facility was not the best, and the attitude toward June shown by the staff was coloured by the morality of the times and by the staff’s awareness of her situation. It was an era in which little concern was shown for the welfare of unwed teenage mothers. And when decisions were made, neither excess time nor skill nor consideration were invested beyond saving June’s life.

  Three days later, when it was clear she would survive, when it was evident that no tinge of blame, neither moral nor legal, would rest with the hospital and its staff, they told her.

  “I could never have another child,” she said in a voice free of bitterness. “That was what they left me. No baby and no opportunity to have another. I insisted on them returning my son to me. If he was the only baby I could ever have, I would keep him, regardless of the cost. But they said it was impossible. The adoptive parents already had custody and were untraceable, the papers had been signed, the lawyer had closed every loophole and refused to identify his clients short of a court challenge. There was nothing anyone could do or wanted to do for me. Nobody said it, but I could tell. It was my punishment. For being promiscuous, for being a bad girl, for being an unmarried mother.”

  She screamed silently inside herself for days, and when Parker arrived the following week she told him the miscarriage had been so physically devastating that it had left her barren. Parker cried with her and shared the blame, assuring her he would make it up to her.

  Parker would do the correct thing.

  June would remain silent.

  A week later Parker gave her a formal engagement ring, more out of guilt than love. He never proposed marriage. It was something they would be expected to do, bonding themselves to share the secret and the tragedy.

  June returned home where, with her father’s assistance, she obtained work as a legal secretary. A month after his graduation from law school, she and Parker were married. June’s aunt had died a year earlier. And June’s parents, whether they knew the entire truth or not, simply never discussed the matter between themselves or with their daughter and son-in-law.

  “It’s the way they dealt with unpleasant things,” she explained. “They simply avoided talking about them.”

  Parker Leedale abandoned his plan to practice law in New York City. He and June purchased the house on Miner’s Lane, and Parker settled into a routine of wills, real estate transfers and civil suits while June helped with office duties, collected antiques and propagated roses.

  One day, a few years after she and Parker married, a Jaguar sounded its horn and pulled to the curb as June was shopping on Main Street. Sonny Tate stepped out of the car and smiled across at her. He had driven up from New York for his mother’s funeral and, when he invited her to go for a ride, she accepted, fearful that Parker or someone he knew might see her but unable to resist Sonny’s smile, his charm.

  They parked by a cove on Nickerson’s Neck and he told her about his career in advertising, his apartment on East 62nd Street, his business trips to Europe and Japan.

  And she recounted her marriage to Parker and other news and, finally, when they had run out of other things to say, she told him, avoiding his eyes to stare out at the horizon of the sea, that he was a father. That together they had produced a son.

  “I thought he would be shocked or concerned about me. Anything but pleased. But that’s what he was. Pleased. ‘No kidding,’ he said. Grinning like I’d just said he’d won a lottery. He wanted to know more about the baby but I told him we would never know, him and me. We would never know where or who our son was, and I told him to take me back to Compton and let me out of the car on a side street where no one would see me. He promised he would never say anything, he would never discuss me or say we had been together and he would never try to trace his son. And that’s the last I ever saw of Sonny Tate.”

  Parker and June maintained their idyllic routine while the marriages of their friends dissolved around them, and as they watched the wounds open and fester and close on the men and women and their children, there were times they told themselves they had been fortunate, that things might have been much worse. And there were deaths. The deaths of their parents and relatives. The death of Terry Godwin and others in the war.

  Parker’s law practice thrived. Their income was sufficient to pay for frequent vacations in Europe and the Caribbean and expensive gifts for each other.

  Their friends were envious of them. For their financial freedom and their apparent compatibility.

  There were times when June Leedale agreed that they were blessed, she and Parker. For long periods of time it seemed as though there had never been a Sonny Tate, never a betrayal of one by the other.

  Until almost twenty years passed and June Leedale answered a knock on her door one summer morning to greet a youth on her threshold, the young man shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot, a familiar crooked smile creasing his face.

  “I had no idea who he was,” she said, looking up at McGuire for the first time in several minutes. Her jaw had grown slack and her words were rounded and ind
istinct, as though the corners of the consonants had been worn away. “Until he spoke. And it struck me like a physical force.”

  She turned from McGuire to look at her front door.

  “That’s what it was like. As though someone had hit me full in the chest and knocked me back into this room. He said, this young boy said, ‘Hi, are you Mrs. Leedale?’ Very polite, very formal. He was wearing a jacket over a T-shirt. Pressed slacks and white sneakers with no socks. I remember he had no socks. And I said, yes, I was. And he said, ‘I’m Dave Elwood, and I think I’m your son.’”

  She began to shake violently at the memory. McGuire rose to calm her but she shrank from him. Her hands flew back and forth in front of her face, like frightened birds on a tether. “No, please!” she pleaded, and McGuire sat again and waited for her to continue.

  “Some law, some stupid law, had been passed,” she said, her fingertips pressed against her eyes, “saying children could seek their biological mothers when they reached age eighteen. The state had to open their files to them. But no one thought how the mother would feel. Back then, no one stopped to consider it, they just revealed all this information to adopted children. Stupid, it was so stupid.”

  She pulled a tissue from a box on the side table and dabbed at her eyes. “Well, what . . . what do you do at a time like that? I mean, you’re a mother and there’s your son. . . . .” She lowered her hands and smiled in embarrassment. “It was like . . . almost like a blind date, I guess. So I invited him in. For cookies and milk.”

  They talked awkwardly for an hour, mother and son, David telling her of his plans to study medicine if he could maintain his grades, and she grew proud of him, sitting there with the gestures of his father, with Sonny’s light shining in his eyes, that same glow of confidence and vulnerability.

  “He asked about his father and I lied,” she told McGuire. “I told him his father had died. Then he asked me to talk about his dad, what he was like, show him a picture. And I realized how late it had become and how soon Parker would be home. It was madness to do this. I suggested he leave and asked him to promise that we not see each other again. I told him I loved him but that our lives were separate, that he had a mother who surely loved him as much as I did. So I asked him to go. And he did. He said he would call me later, there was more he wanted to say to me, but I pleaded with him not to call. Although I knew he would. And I guess I wanted him to.”