by Monica Wood
His fingers began to flutter. “You had a baby? In the circus?”
Gently, she took his hands and closed his fingers. He tucked his hands beneath him. And waited.
“I came home from the midway,” she said quietly. “In disgrace.”
He waited some more. Her head felt composed. The kitchen went quiet. The yard went quiet. The air, the light, the dust on the sills, the names and names on the list.
“Do you know where babies come from?” she asked him.
“Babies come from a sperm and an egg.”
The boy did not move.
“Well,” she went on, hardly meaning to, “this baby was born and I gave him away.”
The boy’s fingers started in again. “Where’s your baby now?”
“He’s a doctor.”
One.
“What kind of doctor?”
“Surgeon.”
Two.
“Surgeon of what?”
“Hearts, if I recall.”
Three.
“What’s his name?”
“Laurentas.”
Four.
“Laurentas what?”
“Laurentas Stokes.”
“That’s the same as your tutor lady. Maud-Lucy Stokes was your tutor lady that you loved more than your mother.”
She tapped his guiltless forehead. “You don’t need a tape recorder. You’ve got the recall of an elephant.”
“Your baby is ninety years old.” His fingers stopped moving. Maybe he was out of categories.
“Ninety?” Ona said, shocked. But of course the boy was right. She’d met Laurentas once—not counting his birth—in 1963 and had frozen him there in middle age, a hardy, nice-looking man with Viktor’s coloring. For a time, they’d kept in touch—tellingly brief letters signed with their full names—and eventually their exchanges dwindled to the occasional Christmas card.
Ona got up, aware of the boy’s eyes on her. She took a packet from her cupboard. “Here’s the last one I have.” The postmark was five years old; the one before that, eight. “We never got the hang of correspondence.”
The boy examined the return address: Bridle Path Lane. “Does your son have a horse?”
“He’s in a condo, for crumbsake,” she said. “Since about ten years ago.” Retired at last, new condo very nice, happy new year. Yours, Laurentas Stokes. She felt suddenly depleted. “You don’t think so much of me now.”
He blinked at her. “Why?”
“I told you my secret.”
“What secret?”
She rattled the envelope.
“About your baby?”
“Yes!”
“That’s a secret?”
Ona had not felt so powerless against her own fortress in decades. “Of course it’s a secret,” she said. “My own husband never knew.” Howard, so uninspired in the boudoir that he never discovered her scar. “And I’ll have you know I did not foresee spilling my secret in the winter of my life.”
But now that she had, a room opened up in her body, an empty chamber that called for filling up.
“Why did you name your baby Laurentas Stokes?”
“Maud-Lucy named him. I wanted to name him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, the unsuspecting virgin. Maud-Lucy took him back to Granyard and raised him among her own people.”
“Did you marry Viktor?” the boy asked.
“You can’t pin down heedless men.” She smoothed the envelope. “After Maud-Lucy whisked Laurentas off to his beautiful life in apple country, I sorted rags in the pulp mill for two years, then my mother sent me to Portland for a secretarial course at Brooks School for Secretarial Studies, and after that I married Howard Stanhope, an old-man widower of thirty-nine.”
The boy kept his kindly gaze upon her and said nothing.
“Life with Howard was mostly a misery,” she told him. “That’s a secret, too, I guess.”
“I’m good at secrets,” the boy said, studying her so intently now that she began to feel stripped after all—in a good way, stripped of decrepitude and shame.
“Enough,” she said, returning to the boy’s lists. “Look at all these names. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in the running for something. Not in all my life.”
“You can win,” he said. “All you have to do is not die.”
“That, my young fellow, might be easier said than done.”
The boy set the recorder between them. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said. “This is her life story on tape. This is Part Two.”
“Do you think you could say something other than ‘life story’? In a less portentous manner?”
What should I say? he mouthed. Though he made his initial announcements with pomp, he otherwise maintained his habit of silence by mouthing his interjections, pointing to Mr. Linkman’s questions (What are your strongest memories of World War II? In your opinion, what was the greatest invention of the twentieth century?), or writing new ones on the fly, impeccably spelled and divided into parts and handed over cautiously, lest the rustling be picked up on tape.
Sometimes he turned off the machine to ask a left-field question—What did your baby look like?—that left her flummoxed and strangely willing as he flicked the machine back on to immortalize her response. His motionless attention had the serumlike effect of loosening both her tongue and her memory. Sometimes he forgot what was secret and what wasn’t. Eventually, so did she.
* * *
This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life story on tape. This is Part Two.
Do you think you could say something other than “life story”? In a less portentous manner?
. . .
I don’t know. Memories. Shards. Little—little nothings that add up to—something, I guess. I hope.
. . .
All right. Fire away.
. . .
What difference does it make what he looked like? Skinny, jaundiced little thing. Bald as a boiled egg. Poor soul had a devil of a time getting born. I was a big-boned girl and he had no more heft than an August potato, but still he had to be cut out of me. Do you know about that? Cesarean?
. . .
Well, you’re a reader. I guess you know all kinds of things.
. . .
Were you, now? Well, Laurentas wasn’t premature, he was late. Thank God I was young. Hard to believe now, but I was. Young and hardy.
. . .
That’s very kind. Thank you. Where was I? One little compliment and I’m all balled up.
. . .
The baby, yes. Papa cut the baby out, a neat trick that rivaled anything I’d seen on the midway. My own father, with his farmer’s face. If not for Papa, I’d have died. I’m not upsetting you, I hope?
. . .
Good.
. . .
Oh. All right. For posterity, yes: Jurgis Vitkus. My good father. He gushed tears beforehand. And afterward. But not during. During, he was steady as a post. You saw no blubbering from me, either. I’d dragged home enough shame as it was. So I stood the pain for two and a half days, until finally my father—who as far as I knew was a cherry farmer turned acid cooker—unearthed a leather bag from someplace in their bedroom and produced a scalpel so shiny it hurt my eyes. I didn’t know what to make of it. “Papa,” I cried to him, “Papa, what are you doing!”
. . .
Well, I thought—for a minute there, I thought he intended to murder me in my bed for canoodling with a Russian.
. . .
. . .
I’m sorry. I forgot you for a second.
. . .
The beginning? Well, I was glad to be back home from the midway, despite everything. I was obviously with child. Maud-Lucy came back from Granyard to take care of me.
. . .
Oh, but she jilted her ailing auntie. For me. Papa’s English had improved somewhat over the years, but his written communication was a fright. Mama’s even worse. Such spelling you simply would not believe. I never saw the letter, but Maud-Lucy got the idea I was ha
lf dead from consumption. Imagine her shock to find me perfectly hale and big as a pumpkin.
. . .
Oh, but I was! It takes a little imagination, but I was a round and vigorous girl.
. . .
You certainly do have a good imagination. Who’s the one who imagined my decrepit old self as a record breaker?
. . .
There you go. Anyway. Maud-Lucy took immediate charge of my confinement, reading to me in her third-floor parlor while I ate tinned marshmallows and kept my feet up. She played piano and sang to me and read out loud a very long novel by Mr. Charles Dickens.
. . .
Bleak House. It took her days to read that book. I was so happy. It’s possible that my circumstances—being coddled by the woman I loved most in the world—misled me into believing that time could be peeled back. You’re too young to know how alluring a notion that might be. I kept forgetting that a baby was en route. But when my time came, oh, what a string of surprises.
. . .
One, Maud-Lucy Stokes was bone useless: boo-hooing start to finish, her hands rubbed raw from wringing. Mama fed me whiskey in a porcelain egg cup bordered with hand-painted ivy leaves. Something else from the motherland that I’d never seen. “Sha, sha, sha,” she kept saying. “Sha, sha, sha.”
. . .
I have no idea, though I took it for comfort. Maud-Lucy was just a flitter-flutter at the periphery, bawling and yelling at Papa. Quite rudely, I might add.
. . .
“For the love of God, Jurgis, get her to the hospital!” Surprise number two—that’s right, count ’em up—Papa and Mama defied her. “No,” they said. “No no no.”
. . .
Because the Kimball hospital was a grim and perilous place. Mama heard stories of this one or that one, and it always ended the same: Go inside, not come out.
. . .
Surprise number three, oh, that was the doozy: Papa with a scalpel. He gave me something from his satchel, a powder that Mama mixed with the whiskey, and I fell calm. “Ona-my-love,” he whispered. His eyes were so blue and fond. “Don’t scare, don’t scare,” he said. So I didn’t. I didn’t “scare.” I did go a little hazy, though, as you might imagine, floating there, connected to the shushing of my parents, about whom I knew so little. I longed to speak to Papa in the language they’d denied me. But it was too late; I was Maud-Lucy’s American girl. I couldn’t summon a single word. “I thought you were a cherry farmer,” I said to Papa. “Also doctor,” he said, and the next thing I knew Laurentas was screaming his head off. An August potato with good lungs.
. . .
Never. Maybe they didn’t have the vocabulary. How do you come up with the American words for scalpel? For whiskey in an egg cup? For country doctor and cherry farmer who packed up his family to take a job in a mill five thousand miles from home? It must have been a complicated story.
. . .
Maud-Lucy, well. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that she planned to raise the baby in Vermont, among her own people. How could a woman like that return to those boring apple trees? Those big, square uncles and sickly aunts?
. . .
Well, she could. She did. Maud-Lucy herself was a big, square woman. It took me a time to sort out that she wasn’t beautiful. Too plain for a rich man, too bright for a poor one. Unmarried ladies took the bottom rung of the ladder then. Maud-Lucy had stopped off in Kimball in 1905 on her way back from a trip to the Rangeley Lakes to paint the landscape, a trip she’d made to defy her father, who was trying to marry her off to a dullard who sold trees. Her father’s mistake was in educating her beforehand.
. . .
There was an upset on the tracks, so the passengers spilled out to find rooms in town for the night, and Maud-Lucy ran into my mother coming out of the Kimball Times where she’d just placed an ad for tenants. Their building wasn’t three days finished.
. . .
We did. We thought it was God himself running the show. My mother had me by the hand, a little girl with plaited hair and a dress hand-stitched from flour sacks. Maud-Lucy always said I looked bathed in light.
. . .
I know, isn’t that grand? That was our beautiful story: love at first sight. She stayed with us that night and couldn’t leave me.
. . .
True, there was the tree-selling dullard waiting back home. But you make your stories, and that was ours. It was true enough. In the end, she went home anyway, with a baby in her arms.
. . .
Mama and I walked her to the station. Maud-Lucy looked the same as always—no hat, no gloves, an overdone coat from the 1890s. You know, I can still feel the cold if I try hard enough. It was one of those blue and blustery days. Maud-Lucy took her ticket, then opened the blanket to show the baby’s face. I hadn’t seen him since the first day. I didn’t want to kiss him, but Maud-Lucy insisted. He smelled like a ripe peach.
. . .
Mama was crying, to be honest. “Is good life for boy,” she said. Then Maud-Lucy stepped onto the car. All I could think of was crows.
. . .
You know the way they hop, all black and flapping? Then the train whistle started up. I can still hear it.
. . .
Whooo, it went. Like that: whooo. In my head I was shouting over the noise: Is good life for girl. Is good life for girl, too.
. . .
Well, I watched her go, what else? I was just a baby myself. The train vanished down the tracks, speeding Laurentas to a future filled with science and literature and sizzling conversations that led to a thing being looked up or written down or sent away for. I was the only creature on earth who understood how happy he’d be. Away he went, taking her wit, her zeal, her notorious independence. Her love for me.
. . .
. . .
Sorry. What?
. . .
No. She never even came back for her piano.
Chapter 8
The boy had decided to take no chances. On the sixth Saturday he brought her a list of the most statistically dangerous pursuits, ranging from death by cave diving (getting lost while; running out of air while; being eaten by sea creature while) to death by door (walking into; burning alive while searching for key to; discovering stairs removed from other side of). There were fifty-two items on the list.
“Read this just in case,” he cautioned. “You don’t want to get all the way to one hundred twenty-two years, one hundred sixty-four days, and then accidentally die because you”—here he reconsulted his list—“cut off your thumb while slicing a bagel.”
“I wouldn’t want to go like that at any age.”
After they’d perused the List of Death and Dismemberment, he produced an addendum: home exercise routines for the elderly, plus an updated inventory of supercentenarians (the woman from Japan had died, along with a sketchy contender from Guam), plus ten supercentenarian profiles he’d procured from God knows where. She envisioned the boy’s Internet as a magic cube that crackled with news.
“Look here,” Ona said. “The Hartley woman still reads without her glasses.” She squinted through her own glasses, shuffling the sheets. Some of the profilees were half blind or deaf or off their rockers—these she skipped over with a shudder—but most of them weren’t. “This Wong fellow mows his own lawn. He could be a problem.”
The boy said, “Maybe we can think up a record to hold your place till you get older.”
“You mean in case I don’t make it.”
His eyes flew open. “No! That’s not what I meant!”
She believed him.
“Oldest sky diver is taken. Plus oldest pilot. Plus oldest showgirl.” He frowned. “But the record holders are way younger than you. Are you interested in breaking a record that has already been set?”
“Not without a bone transplant.”
He ticked off a preposterous list of possibilities—wing walking, pogo-sticking—and at the end Ona could think of no plausible record for herself except Oldest Woman to Have Sat A
round Wasting What Turned Out to Be Seventeen Years After Louise Died.
“You’re thirty-six days older than when I first met you,” the boy said, setting up the recorder.
“Ditto.”
He peered out the window. “Can you hear those?”
“No,” she said ruefully. She could see them—goldfinches quarreling—but their music was beyond her hearing.
His face filled with sympathy. Then he said, “I need six more birds for my badge.”
“Spring is nigh. You wait.” She smiled at him, lightheaded with sudden affection. He was so young, and for that alone she liked him.
“Is that your car out there?” he asked.
“Of course that’s my car.” Randall’s old Reliant. “Who else’s would it be?”
His eyes moved to her, pinning her in place. He had something.
“Does it work?”
“It most certainly does. I have it inspected and registered once a year. A man from the Knights of Columbus takes it to the service station for me, since I was unable to renew my license last time I tried and I can’t sashay into a car-inspection establishment with an expired license in my wallet.”
“Oh,” he said. “Darn.”
“That’s not the word I used.”
“I thought you might be a driver. A car driver.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t a driver. I said I didn’t have a license.” She leaned in. “Because of my age I was required to take a road test, and the sixteen-year-old tester flunked me.”
“Maybe he made a mistake.”
“I told the church ladies I passed.” She hoped he wouldn’t mind. “I told a fib.”
“I told a fib, too,” he said. “I told my dad I like music. But I don’t. There’s too many chords, and it’s hard to keep your fingers in the right place.”
“Now listen,” she said. She straightened up and sang a few bars of “Beautiful Dreamer.”
“That was excellent, Miss Vitkus.”
“See there, you do like music. It’s musical instruction you dislike, and I can’t say I blame you.” She tapped his ghostly hands. “In any case, I drive my car one and a half miles to the supermarket and back once a week, same route every time.”
