The Burning Plain (49 page)

“Did she?”

“She arranged an abortion,” Elena replied. “That was very brave of her, because abortion was still against the law and she could not only have lost her job but been prosecuted. I was grateful because my fall-back plan was to induce an abortion myself.”

“Oh, Elena.”

“That’s what women did in those days, Henry. Thank God for Nora.”

“The professor?”

She nodded. “The doctor’s office was on Grant Street in Chinatown above a restaurant. I remember sitting in the waiting room with Nora, trying not to be sick from the food smells coming up the vent from downstairs. To this day I don’t much care for Chinese food.”

“But you didn’t go through with it. Why?”

“The doctor scheduled the abortions late at night, after her regular hours. There was no one else in the waiting room except Nora and me. I went over to the window and looked outside at the neon signs and the people crowding the sidewalks and the shops, and slowly my own reflection emerged in the glass and I saw myself and realized I could not go through with an abortion.”

Her face had a vulnerability I had never seen before. I reached for her hand. “I wish you hadn’t had to go through that alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was alluding to her professor, but then I understood.

“You think God told you not to go through with the abortion? But you’re not antiabortion. Are you?”

“My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we’re willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone. For some women, an abortion makes sense. I just wasn’t one of them.”

“What happened after you decided not to go through with it?”

“I told Nora. We left the office and went to a coffee shop, where we talked for hours. She was the first person to whom I ever told my life story, and when I finished she said I was an exceptional woman. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Her saying it gave me the courage of my convictions. Nora got me a leave of absence from school and convinced me to move in with her so she could help me through the pregnancy.”

“And the baby?”

“I held her for a few minutes before I turned her over to a nurse from the county adoption agency,” she said.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“In those days you relinquished control completely,” she said.

“And you never saw her again?”

She released my hand and sighed. “Around the time I turned forty, I developed some medical problems that eventually required a hysterectomy. I had never wanted another child, but losing the ability to bear them was surprisingly hard on me emotionally. I had a kind of breakdown, or at least I wasn’t acting very rationally, and I was obsessed with two things—you and my daughter.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because of what we talked about the other day. The guilt I felt at not protecting you when you were a child. That was nothing to the guilt I felt about putting my daughter up for adoption. I went looking for her.”

“Did you find her?”

Elena nodded her head. “Yes. The agency was very helpful. They encouraged me because, well, you see, Henry, she was not one of their successes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Thirty years ago, brown-skinned girl babies were not very placeable. She was never adopted. She grew up in foster care and group homes. She was at a group home when I found her. A Catholic charity group home that was run by my former order. I arranged to visit the home without disclosing who I was.”

“Why?”

“I thought it would be less shocking to her if she got to know me first as a person before I told her I was her mother. I went ostensibly to talk to the girls about going to college, and I saw her. She was fourteen or fifteen. A chubby little girl squeezed into pants two sizes too small for her, with teased hair and too much makeup.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Not directly. I went around the circle and asked each girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. When it came her turn, she said beautician.”

“So?”

“The two girls before her gave the same answer. She was simply imitating them. Seeing her, hearing her, exposed the foolishness of my fantasy.”

“What fantasy?”

“I thought she would be like me at that age, but she was like the
cholas
we grew up with, Henry. The bad girls, the gang girls. I tried to imagine bringing her home, but I couldn’t.” She closed her eyes as if in pain. “My maternal instincts weren’t even as strong as my snobbery.” She fell silent. “A few years later, when I had grown up a bit, I tried to find her again. I was ready at that point to establish whatever relationship I could with her, but by then she had turned eighteen and was long gone. I learned she was married and had had a child. At the hospital where her son was born, I found a social worker who knew where she was, but she refused to give me my daughter’s address. I persuaded her at least to give her my name and how to reach me. But I never heard from Vicky, so I don’t even know if she got the information.”

“Vicky?”

“That’s what they named her. Victoria Maria.”

“That’s a lovely name.”

“Isn’t it?” Elena said. “I’ll never see her again.”

I reached for some consolation and found the same one she had given me when I worried about being needed. “You don’t know that, Elena.”

After a moment, she said, not very hopefully, “I’d like to believe that.”

A
FTER TEN DAYS, I WAS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL.
Dr. Hayward came in as I was laboriously dressing. He stood at the doorway and watched me clumsily attempt to button my shirt. After a moment, he entered the room, gently moved my hands aside and delicately looped the buttons into the buttonholes, applying the same single-minded attention with which I imagined he performed heart surgery.

“Top button, too?” he asked. His warm breath glanced my cheek, smelling of coffee and peppermint.

“No,” I said. “I’m not a geek.”

He stepped back as if to admire his handiwork. “How do you feel?”

“Like nothing happened,” I replied. “And like nothing will ever be the same.”

He dug out a tube of breath mints from his white jacket and peeled two. “Mint?”

I accepted. He sat down lightly at the edge of the bed. I now realized he perched on beds not to create rapport with his bedridden patients, but because he was always tired and took every opportunity he could to rest. Like most good people I had known, he was seriously overworked, a condition that did not lend itself to treacly saintliness. He was unsentimental, direct and caustic, but acted out of such palpable kindness that I could not take offense.

“Everyone dies of something, Henry. What you now know is that the probabilities are you’ll die of heart disease. Even if you follow the treatment plan I gave you and do it all perfectly, given the severity of your heart attack, your lifespan has still been shortened by probably ten years. If you don’t follow my treatment plan, you could be in serious trouble a lot sooner.”

“You’re telling me this to scare me into taking my niacin?”

He crunched his mint. “To a point. I’m also telling you this because now is the time for you to start thinking about doing whatever it is in life that you’ve been putting off till your old age.”

“I don’t have any secret fantasies, Doc,” I said.

“I can give you a regimen to keep you alive,” he replied. “I can’t give you a reason for living.”

“Has Elena been talking to you again?”

“No,” he said. He slid off the bed and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been doing this a long time. Most of the time when people survive a heart attack as serious as yours, along with everything else they feel exhilarated, euphoric. You seem disappointed.”

“You pushing antidepressants again?”

“If I thought they would help.” He gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze. “You’re still a relatively young man. You’ll be around for a while. Make the best of it, Henry. Live every moment as fully as you can, even if all you’re doing is eating a bowl of soup.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll see you next week. You have my number if there’s an emergency.”

“On automatic dial,” I said. “Doc, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Even the bromides.”

“Remember that when you start getting the bills,” he said, and was gone. A few minutes later, Elena arrived with the wheelchair that she had gone off to fetch just before Hayward had turned up. I settled into it and we left.

My house was built atop a canyon on a dead-end street in the hills above Franklin Boulevard, east of Hollywood. Gray-green undergrowth filled the canyon; the views from my deck were of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west and, on clear days, the San Gabriels to the east. These brown, craggy mountains were a reminder that, although its boosters like to claim Los Angeles was the gateway to the Pacific Rim, it was essentially a western city. However crowded the city got, it was still pervaded by that western sense of unlimited space, vast emptiness and hidden wilds. The isolation that was so much a part of the city’s psyche, the feeling that its ten million people were all living parallel lives that never intersected was, in part, a function of this landscape in which we were all like pioneers engaged in solitary struggle over the mountains to some distant valley of repose. I had lived in the city now for more than ten years, and of the hundreds of people I’d met, only a few had stuck. Many of them were at my house when I arrived home. They had cleaned my house, filled it with flowers and, as I later discovered, stocked my freezer with casseroles. They were waiting for me in the living room, which they had decorated with streamers and balloons and a
WELCOME HOME HENRY!
sign strung across the doorway. On the dining room table, amid bowls and platters of food, was a chocolate cake in the shape of a heart.

“I can’t believe this,” I said.

Elena said, “It was Edith’s idea.”

Edith Rosen bustled toward me, a small, plump, gray-haired woman of sixty, a psychologist whom I had met while working on a case involving the drug and alcohol rehab where she had worked. She currently worked for the county’s Department of Mental Health Services, providing therapy to all those crack babies of the late 1980s and early ’90s who were now on the verge of adolescence with problems that started at attention deficit disorder and got worse from there.

“Sweetie,” she said, hugging me. The top of her head came to my neck, her frizzy hair tickling me. She stepped back, assessing my appearance. From the sudden dampening of her eyes, it was clear she did not like what she saw, but she made a joke. “There was a lot of discussion about whether to shout surprise when you came through the door. I’m glad we didn’t.” She led me into the room. “Come and sit. We won’t stay long, you probably need to rest.”

“I’ve done nothing but rest,” I said.

I eased into an armchair and looked around the room at all my friends. One of them murmured, “Speech,” but I shook my head, too moved to speak.

The party broke up early, and one by one as they were leaving, my friends came up to say a few words of affection and encouragement. Edith, who had been cleaning up, came last.

“Thank you for doing this,” I told her.

She tried to smile, but her eyes glistened. “You’re much too young to have come so close to dying.”

“The doc says if I follow his orders I’ll have pretty much the usual life span.”

“Well, just in case,” she said. “Take this.” She handed me a leather loop. A pendant hung on it, a dark red stone, smoothed and polished and cut into the shape of a heart.

“What is it?”

“The stone’s called red jasper.”

I slipped the loop over my neck, tucked it into my shirt. The stone was warm against my flesh. “Thank you.”

“It’s a spare, Henry. Don’t lose it.” She grinned. “Well, maybe to the right man.”

Elena had volunteered to stay with me for a little while until she was sure I was all right. I was awakened early the next morning by the urgent murmur of her voice talking on the phone. I pulled myself out of bed and fumbled around in the closet for my bathrobe. There was a quick knock at the door and then she came in. Her expression stopped me in my tracks, the robe hanging limply over one arm.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I’ve got to fly home,” she said. “I’ve talked to Edith. She’ll come by this afternoon to look in on you.”

“Is it Joanne?”

She shook her head. “It’s my daughter. Vicky. She turned up black and blue at our doorstep last night, with her son, begging for help.”

“Help for what?” I said after a long moment, still befuddled by sleep.

“Her husband beat her,” she said. “She told Joanne she had been in a shelter for battered women, but they’d asked her to leave and she didn’t have anywhere else to go where he wouldn’t find her.”

“How did she find you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The social worker from the hospital must have given Vicky my address after all.”

“That was years ago. How can you be sure it’s her, Elena?”

She answered impatiently, “I can’t until I get home.” Then, relenting, “I’m sorry, Henry. This has taken me completely by surprise.” She half-smiled. “The other day in the garden, you told me I might see her again. It must have been a premonition. I’ve got to pack. I feel terrible leaving you on your second day home from the hospital.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said.

I slipped my bathrobe on and followed her into her bedroom, where she began packing in a distracted manner, as if her mind was coursing along a half-dozen tracks.

“It’s odd,” she said, carefully folding a slip. “My two regrets in life were that we weren’t close and that I had lost my daughter. Now suddenly you’re both back in my life.” She tossed the slip into her suitcase, undoing the folds. “In each case a crisis brought us together.” She threw some blouses on the bed. “I’ve always believed good can come out of suffering. This proves it, doesn’t it?”

“I know I’m grateful for you,” I said. “I’m sure she will be, too.”