Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

Given her unsettled girlhood, the Russians’ sense of Fate had spoken to her early. She’d been assigned a decapitated father, an unsought pregnancy courtesy of her dad’s killer; eventfulness in fiction did not embarrass her. Fate no longer seemed the design concept making Novels of Coincidence easier to write. Fate felt—like tidal waves or hurricanes—an inexorable, arbitrary natural force. (If she had ceased at age fourteen to believe in Luck, she now accepted Fate as Luck’s adult-content replacement.)

  It helped her feel less guilty for that single child-producing lapse. Fate contained a trillion human currents pooled. Blackened, it surged with uncounted marked-down lives like hers. She forever spared her husband news of how she missed the baby, her first. The one not his.

  Being an only child herself, she always thought of her eldest as her only child, too. This, despite the evidence of two live-in daughters so visible and demanding, so adored and readily at hand. The girls, being “planned babies,” seemed products of a different, drier life. The truest child was her accidental hidden one.

  HER OWN AGING mother never would discuss that birth. She ignored how single mothers lately kept such children. These days, in enlightened circles, it was even considered chic. Newspapers claimed that over sixty percent of recent babies got born to young unwed women who simply wanted babies! The doctor’s wife found it cruel that fashions in behavior changed so fast. A shift earlier might’ve allowed a girl to finish high school with her own out-of-wedlock child snug in its kid’s room down the hall. Her irritable widowed mother might easily have claimed that baby as her own late-life slip and present joy. That way two children could’ve grown up siblings.

  Times it felt unbearable, not even knowing which continent her baby had been carted off to. Which talents had her likely little girl developed? Whom did the child most resemble? This mother of two lively daughters sometimes found herself, while waiting at kiddie pools, studying certain older girls. Especially any talkative evident leader. If she saw a blond kid the age of her firstborn, she stared over-top whatever big Russian novel she then held.

  Crying babies could somehow make her feel frantic. Odd, but six-month-olds were hardest. Hearing some stranger’s infant sob made her jaw set, made her organs of reproduction inhale upward an inch and a half. Her field of vision whitened.

  The few written records brought south from that “home” in Newport News had been burned by her mother.

  WHEN SHE ENTERED grad school as an older student, the Internet was new, at least to her. She had secret reasons for learning what still seemed a sci-fi novelty. With all her frontal duties of Hospital Guild and social life, with so many public chores around her daughters’ school, she longed for some investigative privacy. New skills would be needed to research her own lost life. She had read: what prevented folks her age from learning the computer was plain fear. She told herself she’d got over that long ago. Intuitive, she noted this technology’s arriving, like Fate in a black dress, just when she felt readiest.

  Over time she had become both more secretive and superstitious. Without a spouse demanding explanations and chatter, she set up her own interior lab, almost an altar. And her missing child, marked X, stood radiant if unfocused at the center of it all. —She bought a “personal computer,” guessing the gizmo might truly make her future “personal” at last.

  Along the hall marked SLAVIC LANGUAGES, she took note of certain bright young grad students. A few tolerated the interest of this smiling mature lady. She endured overhearing one acned girl refer to her as “Mrs. Doris Day.” That smarted; but she imagined how her daily cheer and cashmere cardigans must look to someone that scholastical and lonely and twenty-two.

  One clever antisocial boy wore black leather motorcycle gear. Sometimes creaking like a hassock, he kept mostly to himself. He was among the few kids then typing class notes right into their computers. The boy’s laptop wore a matching zippered leather case. Like a gunslinger, he never stepped toward to the bathroom without the thing. She watched him unfasten his in class. She saw in his hands the tender briskness of some priest unfastening his last-rites home-visit Communion kit.

  She noted how fast the boy’s filthy fingernails blurred over keys, eyes fixed on the professor. She determined to annex just his sexy ease at warming up technology. She cornered him after class: “Would you risk a Student Union espresso?” Though withdrawn, the boy tried carrying her briefcase across campus. “Oh, I’m still spry enough,” she smiled. But found the offer touching.

  Having entered her thirties, she’d worried about her loss of looks. But he paid for her coffee, using wadded ones and likely Laundromat quarters. The back of his neck looked very white. It slowly came to her—being someone nearer his mom’s age—he half-liked being seen crossing campus with her, an “older blonde.” She praised his evident computer talent.

  “Second nature,” he shrugged, jacket creaking. The boy soon held open the library’s heavy door. Sure, he’d be willing to show her certain search-function basics, why not?

  She chose a corner half-hidden behind PERIODICALS IN PORTUGUESE. He sat demonstrating how to get around the Web and “launch a search.” She risked observing aloud, “Don’t you think the words ‘Search Engine’ sound like a new name for ‘God’?” He let that pass without comment. His pianist’s fingers brought a key phrase onscreen. She watched that pitchfork then leapfrog into crash course connections. She perched close enough beside him to know he smelled like sock-elastic and pizza dough. For all the roughness of his dirty nails and black leather, his skin showed a pallor peculiar to new babies and old men.

  The simplicity of her start-up questions made him laugh, then moan. “Oooh,” he shook his head, embarrassed to even look at her.

  “Hey, have to start somewhere. You’re the only one I’ve ever asked, okay?”

  The kid answered in some code he considered English. He appeared to have studied, not six years’ Russian, but a lifetime’s speculative fiction. He soon stuttered out letter-number combinations. For starters he’d explain how programming concepts differed from Apple to Oracle to Microsoft.

  “Whoa, you.” She almost touched his ivory arm.

  “Back up. Imagine me as someone who’s been locked for life in a nineteenth century orphanage. No, say a newborn. For instance, does this thing have one plug or several? Are its signals traveling by air or through buried lines? Like that.”

  He turned on her a pity now becoming interest. He found it hard to back off far enough to even picture a screen so blank as hers. He soon spoke louder, as to some child about to grow restless. As he swiveled his chair, their knees bumped. He studied her tanned legs. He told her: With every question asked then answered, she looked two years younger, did she know that?

  A put-down? a come-on? both? She sensed his pleasure, teaching someone older. But that just made her feel more ancient.

  She did learn very fast, fearless at acquiring what he attractively called “access.” He grilled her: What was she hunting so hard? As a fellow Russian scholar, he assumed she wanted to attach the newest literary data. So much was just then coming online as the Soviet Union dissolved. His typing shot her to sites still locked within barbed-fences of Cyrillic script. For her he summoned from the steppes of cyberspace Stalin’s arrest-orders for great writers he’d had executed, Babel and Bulgakov. Raw KGB files now stood unshackled to all comers. “Do you believe all this here for the taking!” He said it with a wonder finally young.

  She thanked the boy, apologized for her slowness, tried praising him without seeming to flirt. But she couldn’t wait for him to leave. He rose but not before restudying her brown knees. “Later,” he said, adding, “Whenever.” Child-lingo or some standing sexual offer. Both. Once alone, she rushed around finding an empty computer carrel. She had to be behind a door that shut. She doused overhead fluorescence and started:

  Burwell Home for Unwed Mothers, Newport News, Virginia, Records of Births, Whereabouts Babies Now?

  Typing this, her hands shook. She had to poke last
letters via index fingers alone.

  560 related sites fired up. Lettering burned green on a black field: even that struck her as a brilliant color choice. First she got the history of one tobacco executive Burwell’s Victorian home donated to girls then called “wayward.” True enough. She learned how over nineteen hundred unplanned-for children had been born to these unwed unlucky girls. But soon she hit: “Triple-encoded enforced secrecy-guarantees, precautions embedded in all adoptive documents filed since 1947, make tracing subsequent histories of ‘placed’ children impossible. Private detectives, hired to break the numerical-cryptography employed by Burwell, have admitted to clients ‘hitting the mother of all firewalls.’”

  Mother!

  Despite such barricades, she saw she’d never give up. Maybe another technology would come along in five, six years? Maybe she should hire her young leather Russian scholar to help trace the missing offspring. He surely had gifts. But she feared that, after telling him her life, she’d wind up owing him too much. Still, if he somehow succeeded, she would do anything, would go back to his mildewed bath mat of a rented room. If he ever helped her find her lost lamb, she would endure his bare ribs and casual hygiene with an abased slave’s gratitude. Once she viewed this as a sacrifice for her missing daughter, she allowed herself to picture all the stunts she might achieve against the concavities and seizures of his white white body.

  THE YET-PRETTY still-youngish mother—secret parent to three—had long ago decided her firstborn must be a girl. She knew from high school biology: male infusion determines the sex of any child. And yet, this one time only, she claimed for herself an unscientific right to choose her baby’s gender. Since she was, as a person, both unusually stubborn and highly consistent, she opted to believe herself A Girl Who Bears Just Girls. This at least made clothes-shopping for her two daughters more compelling. She kept a secret running tab of her eldest child’s likely changing size. And while girls chose things, she wandered into the next-oldest section: Junior Miss.

  The family was to spend two weeks of early summer on the Gulf Coast. The first day there, her missing girl would turn seventeen. The mother could not outwardly observe that birth date. But, silent, she still honored the occasion. This freckled mom happened to be wandering the beach with her husband and two legitimate children. The girls kept wanting to change into bathing suits without returning across sun-heated sand to their hotel. Agreeing, laughing, their mother stood helping them slip into their suits. They, giggling, were shielded within one large bath towel zebra-striped. The sight of them squirming, white and naked (protected) on this public beach, made the mother grin. Then she was picturing one spot of lake water, foaming burgundy.

  Blinded by sun, she again found—caked before her eyes—bees’ honeycomb. Its wax overflowed not amber sweetness but different-colored milks. The liquids’ tints, intense as tattoo ink, were shades only a child would trust. She felt near fainting and leaned toward her tall husband for support. When she straightened she knew without understanding how: her “only child” was male.

  She sat hard on sand. Her eldest daughter pulled the zebra towel over her head. She felt—at how many removes?—in the presence of a son. She could picture one cot. It was set inside a stifling green tent; on the stool, toothpaste, Coppertone, baby oil. There was a homemade birthday card signed by many children. This was some campsite, today abandoned of its kids. He must be a counselor here, his charges off on some bus trip, leaving him alone. He wore only khaki shorts. He seemed to fill the tent and had about him the air of some giant pup, atypically on his own. She could barely make out his features for the glare. Resting on the cot, looking up, he held a round shaving mirror. It was his birthday and, to commemorate, he kept staring at his own reflected face. Sunlight ricocheted. She knew that, instead of admiring his features, he was consulting them. He scanned for traces of his history. Head shifting side to side, the boy kept seeking any sign of her.

  Still fixed on his image caulked direct before her face, she pressed one hand across her eyes. She now claimed sunstroke. Rising with help, she asked her doctor-husband to watch their daughters’ swimming. She returned half-stumbling to the hotel.

  She changed into a provided white robe and settled on the balcony. The breeze there cooled her. She kept gazing out beyond her family into the swelling ocean itself. She felt lost in joy at knowing of this boy. Some firewall separation had been blasted by this proof of him. Impossible to say how . . . but she even felt ready to guess at his name. It must be that of some announcing angel. A “Gabriel.” Maybe “Michael.”

  Ever afterward she’d be certain of her firstborn’s sex. With this came an odd quickening. For one thing, her “spell” meant he still lived. Meant he’d continued hunting his own sources. He was out there, taking worthwhile risks without her. Someplace he’d become the kind of citizen that parents entrust with their little campers. She felt irrationally sure he was a decent kid and, unlike herself at fourteen, she sensed he’d held off, grown as he was, from being sexually enlisted. All this she really only guessed about him. How such information reached her, that was a detail she’d long since given up explaining.

  But, the difference between even this much knowledge and nothing, oh, it seemed the difference between Luck and Fate. Yes, it was the difference between “a child they made me put up for adoption” and “my son, Gabriel Michael, just turned seventeen.”

  She never revealed having such a vision. Certainly not to her earnest husband. But the presence of this granted news made our wife-mother-scholar feel less parched. It made her seem more real and dear and “human,” even to herself.

  A LITTLE FORGIVEN, she could now act freer toward her lost son’s very present baby sisters. He would want that, she guessed it now. So she visited her girls more. They were still so young they loved long pillow fights that ended in tears. Even her older daughter slept nightly with a changing crew of preferred stuffed toys. But the girls’ shared hallway was already taped with ugly posters promoting the two top boy bands.

  Their mom now asked for specific permission to hang out in the daughters’ rooms, at night. Girls acted shocked; at first they even cleared clothes and toys, made actual paths across their floors. She asked if she might study the girls’ fan magazines. Covers’ bowl-cut guitarists looked uncomfortably juvenile. Such lads were often prettier than girls. And the daughters, being so young, innocently loved males for winning, even at prettiness! Everybody looks better singing, especially fifteen-year-olds. And maybe such doe-faced balladeers provided merciful first baby steps toward girls’ facing their first hairy protrusive adult male.

  Visiting daughters’ bedrooms, piled between them on one four-poster, their mother now pronounced her strong hilarious opinions of their favorite boy-groups. “Now, this band . . .”—she pointed to a bunch with streaked hair—“should call itself the Highlights!”

  “You are soooo weird!” her eldest squealed, a compliment.

  The mom admitted that another front-boy singer was cute, true; but “being so young, he’s still cursed with, look, the beaver-teeth.” Her girls found this phrase hilarious. It seemed they’d been waiting for it. First the eldest fell off the bed, laughing. Then girls took turns falling off the bed, laughing. Next they ran around the room pointing to anything split or forked, “Eeek, everything in here’s got a bad case of The Beaver Teeth!” Her youngest at once phoned three best-friends to repeat the term aloud, once she’d caught her breath.

  That night the daughters finally heard their mother’s fullest teeter-totter laugh. Being kids, their each endearment came phrased as a complaint. “Mom? you can’t help it, can you? But, hee-hawing like that? you sound like one sick donkey, did you even know? Does it hurt you to? Guess what? Your laugh IS ‘The Beaver Teeth’!” They all giggled separately then together. This just made their mother do far more spastic laugh-snorts, her tears all coming lovely down her face.

  Both girls adored this change in her. “You’re way more funner,” the youngest offered. Sh
e’d allowed herself this baby-talk ungrammar. She finally felt safe from a mother who’d have recently corrected this playful loving mistake.

  Absolved, as in some relay, the young mother lived assured that her son himself was somewhere else but safe. Odd, the more her daughters demonstrated their “new girlfriend” love for Mom, the more secure her distant wandering boy seemed.

  She felt she’d secretly carried him for seventeen years as some papoose strapped across her upper back. Even as he’d grown to be, what?—one hundred and forty-odd pounds, she woke supporting him. But now that weight seemed, if not resolved, suddenly lessened, because shared. Her daughters’ invitations into their rooms seemed unintended favors to their phantom brother. It allowed this mother of three to become more loosely herself.

  She had never met him face-to-face, of course. She had never even seen him. Maybe that’s why he registered as a papoose, a weight if always invisible because behind her. Then on his birthday, on that beach, they’d had their curious juncture. “A meeting,” she considered it. It seemed almost a solar transmission from some worldwide web hurled loose of man-made gear. At the very moment he’d been wishing to see his mother, she—seeking his face—struck that very bandwidth. But this too passed into a haze. She now knew something more about him. But it only made her long to see more. She felt she’d barely glimpsed some single moment of his life, seen as if over a wall.

  Maybe she’d invented it: his being male, and even a camp leader in khaki! But she told herself: if such facts proved fantasies, she’d still need to treasure and believe each one.

  She relaxed into being a better mom for the little ones she could see and touch. She spent more money on her daughters’ clothes and she gave them less austere advice. She now saw their giving in to fads as a sign of health, not weakness. She signed them up for subscriptions to Tiger Beat. When alongside her daughters in their rooms, perusing their latest issue, she let’d herself slide into being a somewhat giddy, sighing, moony girlie-girl. She kept inventing stupid terms her daughters considered classics. The Beaver Teeth, she even felt a little proud of that! I missed out on so much of being a kid and foolish like this myself. Somber, analytic, guilty, she always tried justifying whatever simply felt good.