Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  One awkwardness marred a group outing days after her baby had been “placed.” In the lobby of a downtown Newport News movie palace, the old Warwick, as she entered with other girls still pregnant, Fearnot came across a stroller. The infant sleeping there looked six months old. Its parents stood at a nearby refreshment kiosk choosing candy when Fearnot ran their baby to the ladies’ room. A policeman was summoned, much screaming in the tile bathroom. It was determined that Fearnot was hidden in the far toilet stall, breast-feeding an infant unknown. The child’s own mother especially went crazy, yelling about disease. But the pretty girl would not return the child until confronted, counseled, finally sedated. The policeman was Irish and the father of six and, once he learned of the poor girl’s situation, he became emotional and so solicitous as to prove an inefficient law enforcer. No charges were filed.

  Days later, Fearnot’s own mom retrieved the new young mother, mercifully childless as before.

  Fearnot’s mom had been telephoned prior to the delivery. Home authorities asked her to please be present during labor. Officials stressed the difficulty faced by a fourteen-year-old giving up her firstborn without one family member present.

  The widow had responded (and later regretted), “She got it into her, let her get it out.”

  FEELING THE WEIGHT of gossip at home, much of that brought on via the mother’s public announcements and igniting of an auto, the two relocated directly to a town outside Atlanta. Since Fearnot’s father had been killed in that way still discussed, nothing secured his heirs’ honored place within reputable banking circles of North Carolina.

  Come September this as-yet-gentle girl enrolled at a new public high school under her real name. Within one year, she’d been elected alternate cheerleader and student body secretary. Her secret(s) stayed well-kept. Two years later, she was chosen one of ten Outstanding Seniors. Under her picture—smiling while modeling a new page-boy haircut, pearls over a black sweater—this appeared:

  She came from nowhere. With all our groups rushing to welcome her, she chose her own pet “clique.” Her favorite would be . . . Everybody!

  A well-rounded personality and lively mind, she had already taken several years of Russian! From the start she seemed to know more than us other kids. Clueless ourselves, we still felt glad. She arrived looking perfect as a blank check. Then she slipped up and LIKED us. Right away we felt warmer and safer and even “hipper,” remember? If she liked us we couldn’t be all that bad! Or ugly, either. She never seemed to count on getting one thing in return. She made certain other beauties changed their evil tunes, am I right? “Mean” was suddenly real out of style. Girls who wouldn’t look at you before knew your name because of her. Funny, but if she transferred in during our sophomore year, why do we remember her as being like our best friend from third grade forward? Looking back, she basically “mothered” us, I guess. Where do certain people learn to be so kind? Could that not be taught as a Senior Elective up ahead? —If so, only by her. Pretty please? And thank you.

  BY AGE FOURTEEN she had lost her dad; newly fifteen she’d borne a child then surrendered even that small stranger to several larger ones. Up till then, Fearnot’s best-known flaws had been her quiet vanity and outsized laugh. Childhood friends swore it rushed out her mouth wilder than any donkey’s seesaw yodeling. Something would strike her funny and the whole Sunday school class fell silent. Ladylikeness dropped behind wet leather curtains of caterwauling. “You sound like what I heard one night when a moonshiner got caught in his own muskrat trap!” That was what a Falls service-station owner once told the girl guffawing. But all such giddy loudness had quit her, age fourteen. Only now, outside Atlanta, among certain sudden friends, did she hear first peeps of her own wit returning.

  AT HER SCHOOL, there studied a shy lanky boy similarly fated to succeed. He already stood six feet three inches tall. He did everything so well, his teachers secretly worried he wouldn’t, always.

  Soon as he glimpsed her he sensed a fellow sufferer. Excellence seemed her natural smell. The starch in her round white collar must put off the scent of a costly stationery shop the day it opens.

  Though bashful, he grinned at her. The grin showed a recognition almost-pitying. Like her, he was an only child. Like her, at home, no wised-up older brother ever explained that A+’s are rarely given. He’d already mapped as his own the coming field of transplantation surgery. If some Career Day visitor had suggested “radiology” instead, he would have spared himself the energy of even answering.

  In the cafeteria on her first day, other boys noted the new coed’s pearls and contours. But he saw a stark X-ray of his own ambition. It half-frightened him, knowing he was not alone in wanting far too much. In Herman Talmadge High’s cafeteria, as she sought somewhere to eat, he just kept smiling up at her. He determined to succeed at this, too. Tray in hand, she’d stopped beside his table.

  Somehow the sight of his exposed teeth, big clean “adult” teeth, stirred her. Other Science Club kids eating with him laughed at how his goofball grin kept renewing itself. “What’s up with your dufus face, Dufus Head?”

  Halted there, she asked, “What?”

  “You,” he explained. “You here, too.”

  HE PLAYED GUARD on the basketball team that would become Georgia’s 4A state champs. He might have longed to be less well-rounded, but did not know which evolving skill to neglect first. Unlike her, nothing had yet happened to him. If any club, team or chemistry teacher asked for something, he provided it. He was sixteen and needed very little sleep.

  With silver-blond hair and hard blue eyes, he half-resembled the doctor who had killed her father then implanted her with child before failing to drown himself. The boy did not know this, of course, nor did she need to tell him or anyone. He also looked a bit like the girl’s dead father and, in this, he actually resembled the lissome girl herself. These destined high school sweethearts were both elected senior exemplars then attended the University of Georgia, graduating, not quite noticing, with honors. Their appearing to be siblings first linked then calmed them. Their erotic attraction was not, as other jealous kids guessed, some form of mirror-gazing. Instead, alone together, they could leave their shirttails out. He sometimes skipped weekend shaving, though she never liked that. Both being blondes, their butterscotch resemblance became for each a kind of intermission.

  The two joked about their automatic over-ease at achieving. “Up ahead,” he predicted, “they’ll stop handing us the pop-quizzes we saw coming and boned up on. Wonder how we’ll do then?” He laughed. She did not.

  Her cumulative record was already so full of deletions, botch-jobs. Quizzes had arrived as complete surprises. Her early success had been at pregnancy testing. Grading herself on that project, she’d long-since settled for a lifetime F. Her boyfriend knew only that her father had died in a boating accident. The rest she and her mom kept quiet.

  The young couple’s similarity led them into chambered silences. Tired of standing at podiums, of giving nominating speeches, they retreated into the privileged hush of only one another. Hyper-articulate around others, alone together they fell mute. This became the greatest luxury for each. They went to movies and held hands and, unlike their friends nearby, however bad the film, yelled nothing ironic. He even put up with her mother. The handsome woman talked and smoked. And talked still more, through clouding nicotine. Sometimes it seemed the smoke around her had been mass-produced elsewhere then sent to her for quality-control as she, some half-admired civic filter, continued to inhale it as if eating. Listening, he learned to sometimes nod while always sitting near a window.

  He hardly needed to propose, his lovely quiet girlfriend seemed that ready.

  First, though, she must tell him. Her mom had offered to do that, offering this boy a fuller family history. But the girl saw that as her duty. For that she knew she’d need a new factual language. All understatement. She knew her mother would narrate their joint past only through her usual tabloid words: “headless,” “betrayal,�
�� “sex-crazed,” “heartache,” “incognito,” “orphaned.”

  On a couch at the boy’s student apartment, the girl had just been offered one fair-sized diamond ring. It’d been his maternal grandma’s. His intended bride said, before he even put it on her finger, he would need to know her past a little better. First she called herself “damaged goods, basically.” She did emphasize her starter-innocence. Fearnot said she had been, at fourteen, too trusting and half-lunatic with grief.

  For now this young man held on to the engagement ring. Listening, he slipped it around one index fingertip of his own long blond surgeon’s hand. He’d known about her father’s death but lacked the technical details. She admitted she’d never properly fought off her godfather when he first touched her. She’d been mostly numb, she said. She finally confessed there’d been a child, one taken without her even discovering its sex. She said this genderless infant had been consigned to some unnamed guardian, to that limbo outer space of those born-dead.

  Her would-be fiancé grew quieter, silent. She had told him the whole disaster in three brisk minutes. He cleared his throat. He asked if he might take a walk around their college neighborhood. “And why’d you wait to lay this on me? And what if you hadn’t?” he asked, rising. “Seems so out of character. Can’t help wonder why you’d hold this back.” She shrugged. “Sparing you? Then it got so I felt disqualified from . . . everything usual. Look, I wouldn’t blame you for backing out. You see me as changing your luck here? I know it’s a lot.”

  After forty minutes he had not returned. She waited on the couch exactly where he’d left her. She felt clear: he would be wisest never to come back. That was his right. Her mother was enough of a marital disincentive! Still, she knew she would survive his exit, along with whatever followed. Odd, by now she sat feeling almost relieved. She heard a key in the lock. He stepped nearer, got down on one knee. His basketball player’s length, bent into such floppy chivalry, looked fondly bow-tied. He produced the ring.

  “You did nothing wrong. Hell, weren’t you a baby yourself? I’d like to fly to Maine and kill that doctor. Will you marry me?” “Why, yes,” her answer came. They wed in the college chapel a week after commencement. He enrolled that September at Johns Hopkins Med School and somehow, within three years, they had two daughters.

  ONE CHILD PROVED a born actress, the other turned out to be as athletic as mathematical. The marriage seemed a good and decent fit. Her husband got extra credit for having accepted knowledge of her father’s accident and her secret child. Once those setbacks had been faced, they could go unmentioned. He moved cleanly on. He always ranked either number one or two in his Med School class. His new focus became the Asian woman, also either one or two. He said his competitor’s name was Amanda Chu but that class-rosters listed her as A. Chu. “Like a sneeze, right?” Some evenings he reported Amanda’s small slips of second-language grammar. Competition streamlined him till his face looked like a visor. She had urged him toward surgical oncology or even his first love, the transplantation surgery stem-cell breakthroughs now allowed. But those disciplines took eight to nine years longer. She did admire his drive and envied how sanctioned it all seemed.

  FOUR YEARS AND two children in, the silence between married people can sure start shifting meanings. Quietude held but now it sometimes sounded like an air conditioner’s filter needed changing. They’d once kept silent in retreat from others’ talk; now their own assumptions became topics to avoid. Still, she made him feel respected; he made her feel reliable then too-reliable then almost assumed.

  In public, her hushed doctor-husband acted courteous toward her and, at student parties, jolly. After his radiology residency, he accepted a position near Atlanta; he said they’d both want to return, close by their aging parents. Given her mother’s character (given her mother’s recent Neiman Marcus shoplifting arrest), she did not remember volunteering her own such wish.

  That final winter in Baltimore, during her girls’ naps and play dates, she started reading Russian again. During the Cold War this language had been taught in high schools and colleges. She found she could still read Chekhov with surprising ease. She kept one Russian-English dictionary in her bathroom, another in the car. She tried to imagine her life as it might look patterned and lighted by different Russian novelists. That winter brought record snow and, despite wrestling her children into and out of zippered layers, she fought to read seven to ten paragraphs of Russian fiction daily. Undertaken in secret it became almost a religious practice. The weather, her mood, those nineteenth century narrative geniuses trafficking in the worst which humans can endure, it seemed of one consistency, all dry and cold and white. But pure.

  One heroine of Chekhov’s, asked why she forever wore black, replied, “I am in mourning for my life.” She had married her own aged schoolmaster who once seemed witty. She’d found herself a capital city sophisticate stranded in some garrison town as a local soul. Her explanation of her clothes showed comic self-mockery and was utterly in earnest.

  Arriving in Atlanta, she watched her radiologist sit down with the realtor. Her husband would now choose their home’s location. She saw him pass along the handwritten addresses of his hospital’s best-known senior colleagues. She heard her partner tell the agent, “A suitable new home, maybe four thousand square feet, equidistant between these, our friends.” She noted that those doctors mentioned, all in their distinguished sixties, were hardly friends. Even his new German-sounding word “equidistant” scared her, its ambition’s more calibrated precision.

  The gated compound was not what she’d have chosen. True, its walls were serpentine brick supporting espaliered pear trees. “But something there is that doesn’t like a guard-post,” she told her daughters, accepting that they’d miss the joke. Her husband now went at the politics of hospital radiology with the elbowing ardor of a high school basketball guard.

  Once they moved into the house, he handed her that same list of senior mentors. He encouraged his wife to go and cultivate “the wives” (though two of the doctors listed were themselves married females). He hinted she should find those educated women who still discussed books and issues. “Some really try keeping up. And that’s good for everyone, kids included.” He said he’d already learned the name of the very best such local club.

  She soon watched him, but as a mother might observe her own adolescent son. She kept waiting for that youngster to darken toward complexity, an adulthood. She had granted this man the right to represent her; but lately he seemed about as qualified to do that as your average “greeter” at Home Depot. For him, the doctorly pop-quizzes never stopped coming and her man proved tireless, solving these. One night after three drinks he admitted his high standing on the job. He had overheard two senior colleagues say they believed he could become “something of a radiology superstar. Their words.” She took a long breath. He went on to say that, from here forward, he’d have his life at the hospital. He seemed to explain she would now curate their girls, her club and the house itself, okay?

  HE HAD CHOSEN this outsized barn-red home, a model called “The Braxton.” When she admitted to some ironic feelings about the name and its spare thousand square feet, he gave her one long minus-mark look. He soon knew to leave his wife alone in the depths of their house. He simply let her run the establishment and sometimes mope, as he now called it. If he stepped into a den where she sat thinking her clouded loving thoughts of persons absent, he retreated from such gloom. He only truly touched his attractive spouse if formally invited. She found herself wordlessly regulating his visits to her side of their bed. She found she’d always hated the sort of woman who rationed sex. A meter maid. But he seemed too busy or passive to complain except in sighs.

  She might have preferred a grand passion. She might have preferred some strapping farm boy with dirty fingernails, a home-built motorcycle. Instead, she took inventory and found it mildly disappointing that she’d slept with just two men. Her “type”? That must be blond doctors—driven, self-crit
ical, hand-scrubbing—mouse-quiet during sex, stone-silent after.

  Given years enough of any marriage, she told herself, every efficient person surrenders to the habit of habits. Schedule soon outranks whatever’s fluky and spontaneous. Till sometimes a flat tire—killing your day’s first four appointments—can make you feel paroled, the weedy roadside almost glamorous.

  Still, she was glad for her children, how they needed rules, regular hours. Her daughters proved articulate and nimble, born of achievers to be born achievers, without knowing there’s another project option. And she knew just what to do with fellow goal-oriented towheads. She taught the girls elementary Russian without their even asking the name of this private gorgeous feathered language. The heroics of her girls’ learning to walk and talk, it had made her more forgiving. Even toward her own mother, still stuck doing hours of community service. (Turned out she’d been arrested stealing three feathered Neiman hats, wearing one inside the other.)

  In fairness, her doctor-husband never missed filming their girls’ kinder-gymnastic meets. He tried for close-up artistic angles and, as thanks, once got trampled, fallen-on, much to the delight of spectators. Fearnot sat watching his intense recording of their daughters’ minor breakthroughs. She found herself imagining her missing child, off-the-record. It had no name but “it.” It belonged not even to the tribe of any one gender. Sometimes championing this little ghost made her want to wear conversation-starting black. Some nights, reviewing before sleep, she felt a jealous witness to her own rich life.

  ONCE SHE’D GOT both daughters into first-rate local private school, despite her many other duties, she enrolled as a grad student. She’d now pursue an MA in Russian literature.