Burnt Mountain (14 page)

“Indeed you were. Do you remember throwing up and fainting in your little tree house?”

“I… guess so,” I said. I could remember, but it was like remembering a dream.

She was silent a little while, not looking at me but at the evening light lowering outside my drawn curtains. Then she turned
her head back to me and said, “Sweetie, are you having your period? That can make you pretty sick sometimes, especially when
it’s hot.”

“My period? No.”

“Can you remember when you had your last one?”

I couldn’t. I remembered no cramping, no bleeding, no awkward explanations to Nick. What was she talking about?

“No,” I said doubtfully.

She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

“I don’t like to pry, darling, but have you been… intimate with Nick?”

“I… I guess so….”

“For very long?”

I began to see where this was going. My heart slowed to huge shuddering thuds and my eyes blurred.

“I guess… since right at the first,” I whispered. “But Grand, we always used… I mean he used, you know, those things….”

I could not say “condoms” to my grandmother.

She leaned over and put her hands on either side of my face and looked into my eyes. My eyes, so like hers, so like my father’s…

“My darling, they don’t always work. Not always.”

“But that would mean… I mean, do you think I could be…”

I could not say “pregnant,” either.

She still cupped my face but did not speak.

“But that would mean a baby!”

“Yes, it would,” she said. Tears stood in her eyes.

I felt nothing but a sort of white shock buzzing in all my veins. There was nothing at all real about any of this. We were
acting in some sort of play, an old, sweet one, like
Our Town.
Grandmother and granddaughter in a lamp-lit room, talking about…

“I didn’t know babies made you sick,” I said stupidly.

She sighed and leaned back in the chair and covered my hand with hers. She closed her eyes and then opened them and said,
“We must talk a little about what you want to do, before your mother comes home,” she said. “Of course it’s entirely possible
that it’s not that at all, but we have to decide some things now, before we tell your mother. There’ll be many plans to make,
and the choices should be yours.”

“Plans?” I said, and a wild joy bloomed inside me. It felt sweeter than anything I had ever felt before, or tasted. “We’ll
get married now instead of waiting, Grand! We were always going to get married. We were always going to have children. We’ll
just do it now instead of after college. He can go on to Tech, and I can…”

She was shaking her head, back and forth. Tears spilled out of her eyes now and ran down her cheeks.

“Thayer, you are not eighteen yet. It’ll be a while till you are. Your mother isn’t just going to let you run off and get
married in two or three months or so, or whenever Nick gets back. And do you really think you could begin right now to take
care of a baby? You must realize that if this is true your whole life will change. The main thing is to decide if you want
to keep this baby—”

“Of course I do! What else would I do with it? Even if we don’t get married yet, Nick will love it….”

My voice was rising and my heart was pounding so that I could not get my breath. I knew without being able to see it that
my face was red and furious and corrugated.

“Darling, your mother—”

“Don’t tell my mother! Don’t you dare tell my mother!”

I was almost screaming.

She pulled my face back into her shoulder. It felt the same: warm, safe. She still wore Vetiver.

“This will work out, sweetheart. I promise you that. But your mother will have to know. Of course she will. I’ll talk to her
first. But your mother will have to know.”

“But what if it’s not true? Then we would have told her and it wouldn’t be true at all, and it would be just awful….”

“Well, the first thing you’ll have to do is find out.”

“Can’t you do that? Can’t you help me do… whatever…”

“No. Not for this. This has to be your mother. But I can tell her for you. Tell her first. I think that might help a little.
And you might be surprised. She might understand far better than you think she will.”

“No,” I said, beginning to tremble hard. “She won’t.”

I spent that night and the next day in a maelstrom of emotions, so vivid and conflicting that I could almost see them, like
swirls of violently colored water heaved up by a great whirlpool: simple disbelief that such a thing could happen to me, fear
of my mother’s outrage and my own ineptitude as any sort of a parent, a joy so fraught with tenderness at the idea of Nick’s
and my baby that it made me weep. The heat outside had not abated and the nausea was back, crawling and lingering at my throat.
Grandmother and I scarcely spoke of the day before, but once when I leaped for the telephone and almost fainted on the floor
she said wearily and tenderly, “It won’t be him until the day after tomorrow, darling. You weren’t supposed to be home from
camp until then.
Give yourself a break. I think it would be best if you didn’t talk to him until after we know one way or another, anyway.
I’m going to give you half a sleeping pill, and then when your mother comes in tonight I’ll have that talk with her. I expect
that even if she doesn’t much like it she’ll understand.”

I simply shook my head, unable to fathom that my grandmother really believed that my mother would understand. Not when the
mere name Abrams had seemed to burn her lips. But, in fact, she did. Or at least, she did not seem to be angry.

She was sitting beside my bed the next morning in the same chair Grand had been sitting in, drinking coffee and staring out
my window into the heat-shabby treetops. I was right about the linen and the hair, only this morning it was a peach shirt
and white slacks and her hair was tied back with a scarf of the same peach. She was tanned to honey gold, and when I made
a small sound and she turned her head toward me the blue-violet of her eyes was startling in the shade-drawn gloom.

“Well, Thayer,” she said, and sighed. But she did not frown. She simply looked at me, rather, I thought, as if she had never
seen me before.

“Mama…,” I began, and then, to my disgust and horror, began to cry. And then threw up on the bedspread.

I continued to cry, nearly strangling on my own sobs, while she whisked away the bedspread and brought a towel and a wet washcloth
for me and called downstairs for Juanita.

“Not Juanita!” I hiccupped. “Grand! Can’t you call Grand?”

“Don’t be silly, Punkin,” she said crisply, but her touch
with the washcloth on my face was gentle. “This is what Juanita was hired for. Besides, your grandmother is at her doctor’s
appointment. I know all about it. Your grandmother and I talked last night.”

Punkin had been my father’s nickname for me when I was small. I had never heard my mother use it before. I stared at her,
sniveling. After Juanita had gone with the soiled bedspread, careful not to look me in the eye, my mother said, “Now. The
first thing to do is to find out what’s what. It could easily be something else, you know.”

“It isn’t something else,” I whispered. “I know it isn’t. But Mama, it’s all right! It is! We wanted children; when Nick gets
home—”

“Shhhh.”

She laid her finger over my lips. “There’s plenty of time to talk about what comes next after we’ve seen the doctor. That’s
number one. We’ll go from there.”

I said nothing. I could not have asked for a better reaction, at least not from my mother, but none of this rang right, felt
real. The feeling of being in a play intensified. But this time not
Our Town.

“I’m going to have Juanita bring you up a tray,” she said, rising. “I want you to try and at least eat some toast. Then jump
in the shower. We have an appointment at three this afternoon to see the doctor.”

“Not Dr. Neely!”

“No, of course not. This man is in Atlanta, and he’s supposed to be the best. Several of my friends’ daughters have used him,
and I understand he’s the ob-gyn for Buckhead.”

She kissed me briefly and went out of the room. Her trail was not Vetiver but un Jardin sur le Nil. Even I knew how much that
cost. I suddenly remembered the day long ago when I had stolen a bottle of my mother’s Casaque for Lavonda. I smiled with
my salt-sticky lips. We’d both come a way since then.

I stayed in my room until it was time to go and see the patron saint of Buckhead maternity. Even walking from the house to
the car was misery; the white corona of the sun seemed to lean closer each day. Detritus was sitting in the driver’s seat
of my grandmother’s Mercedes, staring straight ahead. I could hear the car’s air-conditioning from the sidewalk. Detritus
wore his peaked chauffeur’s cap, though not his livery. My grandmother forbade the livery; it had been my grandfather who
had liked it. I wondered if the cap was in honor of a trip into Atlanta or as a tribute to incipient young motherhood. On
the whole, I decided on Atlanta. No one but me seemed too thrilled about the motherhood thing. Oh, but Nick… Nick would be.
I could see the smile that slitted the dark eyes and curved his mouth.

“Oh, Nick, please!” I whispered, getting into the backseat beside my mother. “This is about you as well as me. I can’t do
this without you….”

“You look very pretty.” My mother smiled. “Maybe I’ll take you to tea at the Frances Virginia Tea Room after this appointment.”
I looked back at her. Tearoom? Was this then simply another trip into Atlanta for my mother? Could she not see that this was
the rest of my life?

“That would be nice,” I said faintly. I had scrubbed color
back into my face and brushed my hair into the waterfall of red curls it fell into on its best days and added pink lipstick
and put on a flowered sundress from Lily’s closet. I owned no such dresses. I could not have said why I had done all this.
But deep inside I knew I was doing it for my baby. Nick’s and mine. He would want to know that he had a pretty mother, wouldn’t
he?

“She” did not enter my mind.

We did not speak for the rest of the trip. The frigid air was like settling into a deep, cold river, and I had goose bumps
on my bare arms. My mother noticed and draped the car rug around me. The motor droned and the air-conditioning shushed and
I fell asleep on my mother’s shoulder. When I awoke, my mother was shaking me gently and we had stopped.

The Mercedes stood in the driveway of a huge, ornate Victorian house on a street of similar houses. It was no street I knew:
It was littered and shabby and the close-crowded houses all had peeling paint and shingles askew, and most of the small front
gardens were littered with broken toys. Everything outside the car was bled white with heat. You could actually see it coiling
in a sluggish haze above the pitted pavement.

“Mama?” I said. Surely it was not into this Charles Addams house we were going.

“I know. It looks like a slum, doesn’t it? It was Dr. Condon’s family home back when this was the fanciest part of Atlanta,
if you can imagine that it ever was. He keeps it to honor his father. He was a doctor, too, and practiced here. It might hurt
any other’s doctor’s image, but Dr. Condon doesn’t have to worry about that. He turns patients away.”

“But not us…”

“His son went to Hamilton. He knows who we are,” my mother said. She got out of the car, slumping a little under the fist
of the sun.

I followed her, dazed from my thick sleep and reeling on my untrustworthy legs. She supported me up the smartly painted steps,
lined with vivid pots of flowers that did not seem to feel the sun. Perhaps, I thought, they were artificial. Behind us, Detritus
sat at parade rest in the Mercedes, looking straight ahead. He kept his hat on.

My mother laughed, a small, silvery giggle.

“He’s not used to having to sit out in front of houses like this,” she said. “He’s going to let everybody know it.”

I didn’t blame him. The effect of the big, perfectly manicured house in the surrounding decay was eerie. I did not want to
take my maybe baby into this house.

“Come on,” my mother said, taking my elbow. “You’ll see when you get inside. Martha Coursey told me they give you sherry and
biscuits, or Cokes, if you’d rather.”

She opened the door and I followed her into the dark, varnished cave of the front hall. It smelled of furniture polish and
fresh flowers and antiseptic. We went into a room just off to the right, and I saw what she meant. This had obviously been
a drawing room in the grand manner, chandeliered and Aubussoned, and little had changed except the small windowed cage in
which a pretty young woman in glasses was typing something. She looked up and smiled. There was no one else in the office.

“Mrs. Wentworth? Please have a seat. Doctor will be with
you in just a moment. May I offer you something cool to drink? That heat is murder.”

My mother smiled and shook her head, and I did, too. I could have gotten nothing past the lump in my throat.

“Actually, it’s my daughter who has the appointment,” my mother said. “Miss Thayer Wentworth.”

The pretty girl smiled brilliantly at me and said, “I’ll just tell Doctor that you’re here.”

“If he’s such a hotshot, where are all his patients?” I said, hardly lowering my voice.

My mother frowned delicately at me. Forty-odd years of her little frowns had not left a mark in the porcelain of her brow.

“He was kind enough to stay late for us,” she said. “He usually closes at two.”

A mahogany door beside the typist’s cage opened and a tall man in a spotless white coat came into the room. He wore gray slacks
and a blue oxford cloth shirt and a striped tie, and his dark hair was frosted becomingly at his temples. He had a stethoscope
around his neck and horn-rimmed glasses over mild blue eyes, and when he smiled his teeth seemed to fill his face, blinding
white. I thought he looked like a shark.

“Mrs. Wentworth? Miss Wentworth? I’m Dr. Forrest Condon. Please come into my office. Martha Coursey has told me all about
you. I believe we have the Hamilton school in common, don’t we?”