Goldenseal, page 16
“I told Papi to close our room at the hotel, and to move the desk back to Cal’s studio. He did what I asked. My parents were devastated from their trip to Europe, and they registered the change in the three of us—you gone, Cal and I estranged—but my pain was the ripple of a tossed pebble after a boulder had splashed. Their hopes had been dashed for Mutti’s parents, and Papi’s family was struggling with their health and relocation. My shattered marriage was something that could be fixed, with time. With patience. They knew. They had done it, too. ‘You deserved better,’ Papi said to me. His eyes were tender. ‘You hold your little girl in your arms, and already you hate the man who would hurt her, the man who is probably still a boy, holding his mummy’s hand. And you think, If that little bastard comes within a mile of here, and I will fight him. I will tear him to pieces. But you can’t find that boy; your daughter is the one who will. She grows up, and she chooses that fellow over there, him, she needs him, that little bastard, and you cannot deny her what she wants. You loved Cal. You chose him. I’m sorry that he is such a fool.’
“‘A thousand days,’ Mutti told me one day, gripping my arm. ‘That is what it will take you to forgive him. No less. But more? That is just you nursing the tit of your pain.’
“As usual, Papi was dear and Mutti was right, and after three or four years of me pretending to be Cal’s loving wife, a certain cynical fondness returned to our relationship. Cal was a good dancer and conversationalist. He remembered holidays with lavish gifts. He was always proud to introduce me around. In turn, I flirted with the right studio men to keep us on the lists for the right parties. You could say we had an ‘understanding.’
“But without you to mask Cal’s flaws as a director, his wishy-washiness began to show. After two flops, he was assigned to a different position in the studio. He had a fancy title, but it was really a screening job. Eight hours at a desk, reading scripts, taking meetings. Ushering other people’s ideas through the system. And then the studio system broke to pieces, and massive layoffs swept across the industry. Cal kept his head down and worked harder than ever, but someone dredged up his student connections, and one day they fired him for being a Red. Just like that. Here’s a crate, pack your things, and the chap from security is waiting to escort you out of the building. Cal’s film career was over. Forever. He was thirty-five years old.
“If Cal hadn’t been married, he might have left the city, pursued another life, but he had me to support, and my comfortable life, so he got another job, making TV commercials. It was cheap, tedious work. All his pent-up anger and humiliation had nowhere to go. He started drinking, and spending nights away from home, obvious nights that embarrassed me. It became clear he had a gambling problem, too. You are right about that. Cal was always a sucker for a bet, and having nothing left of himself to play, he gambled our nest egg from Papi. I would have stayed Cal’s faithful wife if he had remained well, but he became sick and addicted, and I couldn’t watch him destroy himself. Cal would have to dry out or I’d divorce him. One day, I told him so in no uncertain terms.”
Lacey did not let herself remember Cal’s face that afternoon, how his mouth had caved inward with disbelief when she’d uttered the word divorce. She did not hear his shocked cry or note his abject silence, and ignored the bitter, suspicious Cal that emerged later, accusing her of cheating, of betraying him, of flinging herself at other men. She blocked out her own sobs, on her long nights alone, after he moved out. She blocked out her hollow dawns. She refused to recall how tenderly Cal had spoken to her on the phone two days before he died, promising he was finally on the mend, that he would do anything to deserve her again, and how she’d slowly, gently hung up on him.
Instead, she opened the novel she’d been reading earlier and pulled out the faded envelope. “After he died, I had his desk moved back to our house. I found this inside it. It’s dated about a month before the plane crash, a few weeks after my ultimatum. You see—it’s your address in his handwriting, and your reply in yours, RETURN TO SENDER. Cal must have hired someone to track you down, and then he mailed you this. You sent it back without opening it.” Lacey smoothed the envelope with her hand. “It’s thin,” she said. “If you hold it to the light, you can see the check inside it. For a considerable amount of money. Especially for a man who was living beyond his means, whose debts would force his widow to sell their house and move back in with her parents. There must be some note with it,” she said. “You didn’t read it.”
“You didn’t, either,” said Edith.
“Would you like to read it now?” said Lacey, her tone light. She held up the envelope. “You were never curious about whether he still had feelings for you, whether he wanted to see his child?”
“His child,” said Edith. “Why not mine?”
Lacey refused to be detoured. “He was the father, was he not?”
“Yes,” said Edith.
“And you were too far along, I think, for any procedures.”
“That’s true.”
“So either you kept it, or you gave it up.”
“What do you think I did?” There was a note of challenge in Edith’s voice.
Lacey met her eyes. “In the end, I think you gave it up,” she said finally. “But when you left you weren’t sure what you’d do. Still, why would Cal send you money? To buy you off? You were already gone. You hadn’t demanded anything. For the child, then. You knew where it was.”
“He,” said Edith. “His name is Daniel.”
Daniel. All these years, Lacey had been sure that the child was the reason that Edith never came back. But the way Edith said his name now, her tone regretful and distant, it wrote the air with a different finality. She must have let them all go, every trace of Cal, of Lacey, of her own baby. It was hard to believe.
“I know that much about him,” added Edith. Her shoulders hunched. “A name.”
“Nothing else?”
Edith reached out and slowly spun the three-tiered dessert tray, but she didn’t take anything from it. She just stared at the remaining array of tarts and cakes, and then abruptly leaned back in her chair.
“When I flew into New York, Stan met me,” she said. “Stan had his own agenda. He had made the mistake of flirting with a former student, and had fallen under suspicion for being gay, which indeed he was. Stan was worried he might lose his position at the school, so he proposed marriage, the best of friendships, and a good job for me. But there was a condition. We would not be parents. The child would be adopted by others.” Her voice sank on the last word, as if others were a euphemism for what she really wanted to say. Kidnappers. Abductors.
“Stan had been abused as a boy,” continued Edith. “He knew that I had been beaten by my father, too. He saw parenthood as a prison for us, in which we could constantly relive the suffering of our young years. Stan also worried that we were twisted inside, and we might inflict our pain on the next generation. ‘It should stop with us,’ he said, one of the only times he ever raised his voice to me. In retrospect, I resist him shaming us that way. It was brainwashing. But back then, I accepted it. I was so exhausted and hurt, by my mistake with Cal, by abandoning you and your parents. I just wanted to see a simple, clean future, but also one where I could read and think and be part of a real dialogue. Marry Stan, and this future was mine. Keep the child, and I faced lifetime bondage. I would have to get some low-paying secretarial job, and never see the kid and barely support us both. Or I would have to marry a different husband, just to provide for us, and be doomed to more pregnancies.” She paused. “It seemed an easy choice, but still I balked. I waited. I grew heavier. I was running out of money.
“Then, through the school, Stan found out about a couple who were desperate to adopt. At his urging, I met them. We had dinner together in some subterranean tavern on the upper East Side. The mother was Jewish, like your mother, and like you, she couldn’t carry children to term. The father was an immigration lawyer, working to get European refugees visas to the United States. They were kind and warm, and they genuinely appeared to cherish each other, like your parents. We only gleaned one another’s first names; we all felt it best that the adoption remained anonymous. Forever. They had one condition for me: the child would never find out he was not their natural-born son. When I left their company, I told them I needed a week to think about it, but I already knew. They were perfect. They yearned for a baby, while I did not. They would give him a proper home, while I could not. They would pay for a safe birth and a tidy sum for me to set up a new life afterward. In return, I would never expose myself as his mother. ‘If it’s a girl, she will be Daniela, after my father,’ said the mother. ‘A boy will be Daniel.’ That’s all I’d know.
“As part of our agreement, they booked me a room in a home for unwed mothers, where two sisters watched closely over us and locked our rooms at night. It was a long winter, bitterly cold. I remember my hands aching deep in the knuckles and my wet hair freezing against my pillow. The other unwed mothers were all teenagers. One child was only twelve. They formed their little bands, had their little spats. Their innocence was cloying; the only thing they wanted was to resume being girls, to go back next summer to their bonfires and dances. They didn’t know they could not be girls again. Once their baby was born, they would forever carry another burden, curled inside them: the fear they had done the wrong thing, giving their child away to strangers. No, they would never be girls again. Most of them scorned me, a woman of marrying age, whom nobody wanted, but one became my friend for life after stopping me from chugging a bottle of floor cleaner and ending it all. She saw that sometimes my head was clear, and sometimes it clouded as the changes overcame my body, as my breasts throbbed and my belly grew like a beast’s. ‘Watch over me,’ I begged her, and she did, until my labor came.
She was the only one who learned my real name. I went by another during that time because I needed to be someone who stayed and bore it, instead of the one who always ran away. Later, the girl found me at the academy. I gave her a job and she nearly ruined me. She’d become a drinker and loose-lipped. But with enough cash, she vanished willingly again. We still keep in touch.” Edith’s mouth quirked. “I suspect I will always ‘owe’ her.”
She spun the dessert tray again. The cakes twisted around their axis.
“The birth was long. My body did not want to surrender the baby, because my mind quailed at seeing the child alive, seeing its helplessness, so like my youngest brother’s, whom I’d abandoned. I screamed, I threw up, I felt my insides squeezing me to pieces, but I could not dilate more than a couple of inches. Finally, the doctors gave me a sedative and I went into a twilight sleep. When I woke, the child was born and gone. A nurse told me I had delivered a healthy boy. Daniel, then. It took three weeks for my ravaged body to heal. I felt like a sack that had been ripped for its grain to dump loose. The doctors had torn me and stitched me up. My belly bulged and sagged. As soon as I could walk, I paced my freezing little room in the sisters’ house, working off the pounds.
“One day, Stan came with a bouquet of yellow rosebuds and an envelope of cash from the adoptive parents, and he asked if I was sure I wanted to marry him. Even when I said yes, Stan made me sleep on it. In the morning, after I had counted the money and the roses had opened, I said yes again. I could have chosen otherwise; the money was enough. I could have returned here, or gone overseas, but any other future left me vulnerable again. Stan’s stability and kindness, and his childless house, were secure destinations. A home, not far from the beloved forests of my childhood. We went to the town hall near the academy and tied the knot. On our wedding night, we talked and talked and held each other, but Stan never touched me naked. He told me that he had trouble loving men, but that he could not desire women. I told him I loved both women and men, and that I needed to be free from conventional ideas of fidelity. We agreed that we could both have private, discreet affairs but that our marriage would be our lifelong companionship and our public identity. Over the years, nothing altered the pledge we made to each other in that dusty town hall. Stan was my dearest friend, and I was his. We treasured each other. I don’t expect anyone now to understand this, least of all Daniel, wherever he is now.” Her voice trembled.
Lacey fingered the stem of her wineglass, struggling to suppress the vision of a young, big-bellied Edith raising a bottle of floor cleaner to her mouth. Or the vision of Edith lying bloody and deflated on a narrow bed, her baby taken away. Pitying Edith for her hardships couldn’t explain anything; it just paved over Lacey’s anger with sadness, like tar over gravel.
“But why would Cal send you money?” said Lacey. “If he went through the trouble to find you, he could just as easily have found out that you were not raising the child.”
“I don’t know,” said Edith. “He must have thought I could pass it on.”
“Perhaps the money was for something else,” said Lacey. “He thought you might work for him again. His muse-wife. He could have been clutching at straws after his career tanked.”
“Maybe,” said Edith.
“Why deny it when it’s true?” Lacey said.
“I never opened the letter,” protested Edith. “You can see that for yourself.”
“But there was something else in the desk,” said Lacey. “A package with a copy of a full screenplay, no return address, but the postmark from New England. You had written him first; you had sent him that story again, the movie script from my hotel room. The script based on you and me, and a friendship greater than both of us. And there were three notes from three different producers to Cal, each of them praising it but passing on it, all of them dated the year before Cal’s death. I read the whole plot this time. Every page. Why not? Cal was dead. You were gone. Maybe you had changed a few scenes, but it was the same story about two girls, a rich girl and a poor girl, who become improbable friends. Together, they run away from home and launch their lives in a frontier city. They find jobs in a hotel, rent rooms, and gleefully torture an array of hopeful suitors—it’s all quite charming, until the poor girl gets the Spanish flu. For once, the rich girl can do nothing to save her. All her wealth cannot stop death. Do you want to know what the producers said? You assumed they would love it.”
Edith blinked. Her eyes were shiny.
“The producers said it was ‘heartwarming’ and ‘smart,’ but a bit too ‘experimental’ and ‘emotional,’” said Lacey, “and they all wondered if Cal could add a stronger male part, perhaps a soldier on his way home from the war, or a cowboy in search of an old enemy. They thought the women’s relationship might work as a backdrop, while the foreground could be a good vengeance plot. Something ‘scorching’ and ‘iconic,’ they said. Cal was, after all, known for his Westerns.”
There was a muffled burst of conversation in the hallway, someone passing the room. Edith looked startled by it. She grabbed for her wine and drank. “I guess that’s not surprising,” she said.
“You must have found out I burned the original,” said Lacey. “Maybe from Cal, maybe from Bruno. Maybe you came here yourself and saw the ash. But for all you were done with me, and done with Cal’s child, and even done with Cal, you were still willing—desperate, even—to sell a fantasy of us to the highest bidder. You didn’t want to stay in that freezing hamlet with your fake husband and your underling job.” Her scorn surprised her; her fury had chosen the words. She heard the Czech army captain from long ago. You are a child with a child’s desire. “You wanted to come back in glory and show us all.”
“How many people have had true friends?” Edith’s voice rose.
“More than you think,” said Lacey. Papi had Bruno’s father. Mutti had her Prague confidantes. What if Edith’s one naivety was not knowing how ordinary it was to love hard when you were young? Lacey wanted to laugh, a harsh, knowing laugh, but it did not come.
“And anyway, if you wanted to dwell on my tragic helplessness,” she said, “you could have just visited me. All my wealth didn’t stop Papi from dying a slow, painful death.”
“My name would not be on it,” mumbled Edith. “I refused to be paid.” She gestured at the envelope. “I didn’t even want to know if it sold.” She hesitated, then added, “You and Cal could have had it all.”
You and Cal could have had it all. The declaration might have shocked Lacey earlier. Not now.
“It didn’t sell,” she retorted. “Cal never got a dime for it. But he tried to throw away my money, to impress you. Threw away our marriage, too.”
She saw Cal running through the Agoura stream again, running for Edith, who was falling from the sky. One night, nearly a year after Cal’s plane accident, after the investigation had closed, a police officer brought Cal’s favorite bomber jacket to Lacey. It had been recovered from the crash site. Cal couldn’t have been wearing it on the flight—his body had been smashed to pieces—but the sheepskin collar still smelled of him. When Lacey slept with it that night, tucked against her ribs, she felt their old love pass through her, Cal’s vitality and passion, the tenderness of their early years. She felt that era separate and pull away—thread by thread—from the bitter drunk he had become. It was only then, paradoxically, that Lacey allowed herself to weep over missing Edith, her friend and blood sister. Only Edith would have understood her pain.
“You thought you would just walk into a dark theater one day, and see us two there, larger than life,” said Lacey.
