Twilight Child (11 page)

 “The doctor
will be happy to make book on it.”

 He reached
for her and moved closer on the couch, embracing her, kissing her deeply on the
mouth, caressing her hair. She returned his affection in kind.

 “And he's
sure it's a—a snowflake?”

 “One or the
other.” She paused. “The snowflake is my idea.”

 “I'll take
whatever comes.”

 He got up and
poured the remainder of the martini from the mixer, noting that she had barely
touched hers. Seeing this, she picked up the glass and touched his, but didn't
drink. She was relieved, but too concerned about her other news to be ecstatic.

 “To
Snowflake,” he said, tipping his glass, pausing in midair, before raising it to
his lips. “Sixteen months apart. It'll be like twins.”

 “Twins are
easier. Only once to the well.”

 “I'll be
right there. Like with Mark.” He pecked her on the cheek. “If it were
biologically possible, I'd have it for you.”

 “If it were
biologically possible, I'd let you.”

 He was in
such a good mood, she did not wish to spoil it, and let him have his dinner
first. She had lit candles, and the flicker had the romantic effect she had
planned. But romance was the farthest thing from her mind. Tray came down, sat
with them awhile with his nightly cookie and milk, then, after the usual
protestations, kissed them both and went off to bed.

 She brought
the letter in with the coffee, blew out the candles, and put on the light.

 “And now the
bad news,” she said, placing the letter beside him as she poured.

 She watched
as he slipped the letter from the envelope. He read the words slowly, and she
knew that he was deliberately withholding his reaction, mulling over in his
scientific mind the best option, the one that would be easiest on her.

 “Rough
stuff,” she said impatiently when his reaction was longer in coming than she
expected. He shrugged and lifted his eyes. Unlike her, anger made him more
controlled and deliberate.

 “It's only a
typical lawyer's letter,” he said. “No cause for panic.”

 “I don't like
the timing,” she pouted.

 “It's an act
of desperation. Very transparent. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say they haven't
got a leg to stand on.” He shook his head. “Damned shame.”

 “You really
think they'd take us into court?”

 “Anybody
could do that. The question is, on what grounds.”

 “So they
could be bluffing?”

 “They have
nothing to lose. You'd think that if they had Tray's real interest at heart,
they would leave it alone. It's been two years. By now one would think they
would have adjusted to the situation.”

 “I can
understand their being upset. But this—I think it's very selfish of them,” she
said, watching him tentatively. “They're just trying to aggravate us. It's an
intrusion, that's what it is.”

 He looked
thoughtfully into his coffee cup. After a while he lifted it to his lips,
watching her over the cup's rim.

 “It's sad,
Frances. But it doesn't make it right.”

 “In time, I'm
sure we would have come to some agreement.”

 “But on our
terms, not theirs. They're trying to force something that we're not ready for.”

 “It's so
unlike them. I can't remember their ever dealing with lawyers.”

 “I especially
don't like ultimatums,” Peter said. “They're offensive.”

 “Two weeks,”
she said.

 “We could do
without the pressure,” Peter said with typical understatement. “Especially
now.” He reached out and took her hand. “We could always capitulate.” His eyes
studied her, and she was the first to turn away.

 “No,” she
said, although the negative shake of her head came before the words. “I don't
think we're ready for that. I don't want any disruptions, Peter. Not now. Not
for Tray either. He's survived marvelously well for two years without them.
He's happy as a clam. And your folks have been wonderful.”

 “I don't want
to come out as Attila the Hun on this,” Peter said, caressing her cheek with
the back of his other hand.

 “See what
they're doing. Now you're guilty.”

 “It's not
very pleasant knowing that you're the cause of other people's unhappiness and
desperation.” He paused and looked at his hands. “It's a matter of priorities.
We'll just have to keep biting the bullet. If they sue, they sue.”

 “As you can
see, they've laid on the hearts and flowers in thick gobs.” She paused and
tapped her forefinger on the edge of her cup. “As if I were some sort of
unfeeling monster with neither compassion nor pity. Most of all, I resent that.
Imagine going to a lawyer.”

 “The bottom
line is Tray,” he said. “As far as I can see, he's doing exceptionally well.”

 “He certainly
is,” she said with rising indignation. “I'm his mother and I know what's best
for my child,” she said, conscious of a slight mistiness clouding her vision.

 “Our child,”
he corrected. She took the hand that was caressing her cheek and kissed it.

 “Why can't
they just let us get on with our lives? Tray is happy, happier than he has ever
been. He loves you, Peter.”

 “I know
that.” He cleared his throat. “And I love him.”

 “That day
when Charlie accosted him in school, I saw the child. He was confused,
harassed. I have no idea what Charlie told the boy, I got there too late. Maybe
just in the nick of time. It was humiliating for Charlie. And it troubled Tray.
Why can't they just leave him alone?” Her voice had risen, and she felt a
tightness in her chest, but it did not stop the flow of words. “I don't hate
them. I know they care about Tray. They just don't understand. They're only
thinking of themselves, as if being with Tray would be some kind of therapy.
Well, I don't owe them that. I didn't marry them. I married their son.” She
felt a sense of rising hysteria. “And it was awful. Just awful—”

 “You mustn't
upset yourself,” Peter said, leaning across the table to kiss her cheek. “Not
now.”

 “Why can't
they understand?”

 “Because
they're not thinking of anybody but themselves.”

 “They have no
right to interfere in our lives. Chuck detested the idea of fatherhood, as if
it were one more intrusion on his freedom. In the last couple of years, he
barely even saw the child.”

 “You don't
have to convince me, Frances,” Peter said gently.

 “I'm sure
they made it sound to the lawyer that somehow I was acting out of spite, taking
it out on them for a bad marriage to their son. I was a good and faithful
wife.” She shrugged. “Maybe not so good in their terms. But certainly faithful.
I tried, Peter.”

 “You're going
off on a tangent, darling,” Peter said gently. “The issue hasn't changed. Now
who's whipping herself with guilt? The issue is Tray. Not your marriage to
Chuck. Not his parent's feelings. The issue is Tray. That's it. That's the
bottom line.”

 “And you,
Peter,” she said. “They have no right to rain on your parade. I wish they would
just go away.”

 He picked up
the envelope, slipped the letter out, read it again, and replaced it. Then he
flipped it casually so that it slid to the other end of the table. His attitude
calmed her, and she grew more confident.

 “Believe me,”
she said, “I understand what they must be feeling. They never did have a good
grasp on what was real. Especially my father-in-law, who couldn't believe it
was possible that his wonderful son could make anybody unhappy. Molly's okay,
but, like me, she was an outsider in that father-son club. Well, I certainly
don't want a repetition of that. Not for my son.” She looked up and rapped the
table with her knuckles. “No. I know what's best for my child.”

 “Our child,”
he whispered.

 “Our child.”

 Her resolve
quieted her, as she touched something tough and strong within herself, a
determination to be assertive, as she had been when she had decided to leave
Uncle Walter's protection. Maybe at the beginning what she had done regarding
Charlie and Molly had seemed an aberration. Now it seemed natural, even necessary.
Peter and she had every right to make decisions for their child. How dare they
threaten to put that decision in the hands of a judge, a total stranger? The
old life was gone, and good riddance.

 “We're going
to call their bluff, Peter,” she said.

 “No question
about that.”

 “And if they
take us to court, we're going to fight them.”

 “I agree,” he
said, reaching out again for her hand, which he gripped tightly. “But you must
take it in stride. You mustn't allow yourself to get upset. That's the one
thing we have to guard against. You've got enough to worry about.”

 She
understood his words, but her racing mind disregarded them.

 “And any
expenses are to come out of Chuck's insurance money,” she said emphatically.
Her original idea had been to use that money to acquire a college education for
herself. But when Peter came along, she had put it in the bank for Tray's
education.

 “That's not—”
he began.

 “Yes,” she
said firmly. “It's what I want.”

 He said
nothing, obviously turning it over in his mind. Inside herself, she felt a
sudden drain of energy, like air seeping from a tire. No matter what, she knew,
no amount of strength or bravado could truly stop the impending pain. As if in
response, a tiny spasm knotted the lower part of her abdomen. She said nothing,
and it soon passed.

 THROUGH
the kitchen window, Molly could see Charlie puttering in the yard.
She stood at the sink, rinsing the breakfast dishes before putting them into
the dishwasher. It was an overcast morning, chilly for early October, and
Charlie was puffing vapor as he bent and rose in the process of flinging dead
branches into the wheelbarrow. Early fall was clean-up time. Charlie would fuss
with the remains of his vegetable garden, preparing the beds for next year's
crop of the inevitable tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and lettuce that would make
up the bulk of their summer salads. He would also prune back the recently
harvested apple and pear trees. Putting the fruits up in jars had become an
annual ritual.

 Goaded by
Charlie's use of the latest fertilizers and insecticides, the garden and trees
yielded more each year. In years past, some of it had always been earmarked for
Chuck and Frances. Tray had especially loved the way Molly did the pears.
Frances's polite note after she had married and taken Tray abruptly halted all
that. Now that Charlie had officially retired, there wouldn't be jars going to
his coworkers. And there were limits to how many she could give away to the
neighbors and the other teachers and students at the school. By now everybody
was so well stocked that even a polite acceptance seemed forced and hollow.

 It wasn't
only that, of course. The whole idea of people and social contacts had taken on
a new dimension. In their age group, people talked about their children and
grandchildren, of incidents, births, marriages, holidays together. Even worse,
they showed pictures. It was simply impossible to hide one's feelings, to
assuage the pain. Molly had all she could do to keep Charlie from seeing her
own agony, for it only exacerbated his. It was better, and safer, to keep to
themselves these days.

 They had
lived in their house in Dundalk for more than thirty years. The plot of land
backed onto a stand of trees on the edge of a flood plain that had mercifully escaped
the ravages of the overflowing creeks and marshland that bordered the
industrial edge of the Chesapeake Bay shore. Built of brick, the house, which
had gone through a series of periodic remodelings, was a cut above those in the
neighborhood, a big fish in a small pond.

 They had
often joked about the eclectic architecture of the area, where the facades
ranged from clapboard to aluminum to false stone. But they had always taken a
feisty pride in the individual nature of Dundalk's inhabitants and enjoyed the
good-natured jokes about its lack of, to say the least, cachet. Many of the
people who had been there when they first moved into the neighborhood had gone,
and younger people were coming in with a lot more in common with each other
than with an over-the-hill couple like themselves.

 When the
subject of selling the place came up, they had always concluded that they just
weren't “movers.” As proof, they could point to generations of their forebears
who had rooted in the comparatively small Maryland towns of Frederick and
Crisfield, and they reasoned that they had already expended the energy of their
blood by taking the radical step of moving to the metropolis of Baltimore.

 Something in
the way Charlie worked arrested Molly's attention. She couldn't quite
articulate it in her mind, like a missing word in a familiar lyric that
required humming the tune again to catch the omission. She stood transfixed,
studying this man with whom she had shared—how did the lawyers say it?—bed and
board for thirty-seven years. He wore his familiar yard uniform, a tattered
orange-background mackinaw, Budweiser peak cap, old wide winter khakis, and
work boots that had replaced the original marine issue combat boots he had
managed, by care and persistence, to keep usable for nearly twenty years after
the war.

 Then it
occurred to her that she wasn't just casting a watchful eye over him as she had
done for years from that very same spot. She was seeing the memories of the
past. There was Chuck, dancing around him, first as pup, then as helper, then
as equal. Gripping the sink, she looked away and saw her knuckles go white as
she strained to make that old image go away. It was still too raw for conscious
recapture. It was more than enough to bear to see them, like old movies, in her
dreams. Often the running reel was interrupted by tremors of sobbing hysteria,
and she would wake up and need the succor of Charlie's reassuring presence and
caress. At times, the tables would turn and it was she that would have to
provide passage through a nightmare.

 Finally she
chased away the old memories and began to inspect Charlie, analyzing, studying,
trying to determine just what it was that was awry. In the nearly two weeks
since they had seen the lawyer, she had seen his mood change. As the deadline
for Frances's response grew closer, he had gone from determined optimism to
sullen discouragement. She wondered if it had been a good idea to consult the
lawyer. Not that she was having second thoughts. But both of them expected a
more concrete reaction. The uncertainty took its toll. Silences between them
lengthened. At breakfast that morning, Charlie had done little more than issue
perfunctory grumbles while he pretended to read the Sunday
Sun
.

 As she
continued to watch him, her eyes misted and she felt the food she had just
eaten congeal in her stomach. He seemed to be slowing down, showing his age.
Always when she looked at him in a reflective way, she could see the outlines
of the younger man, her sweet golden prince, as she had first seen him in his
dress blues. Now the lines were blurring, and the ravages of time and
disappointment were showing signs of their inevitable victory. He seemed to be
hesitating after each movement, deliberately stringing out the activity,
squandering time as if it hardly mattered anymore.

 It was
strange to observe, since he had always rushed through time, treating it like a
precious commodity to be allocated carefully for his many hobbies. He loved to
putter and fix things around the house and yard. In the branches of the
unleafing oak, she could see the tree house he had built for Chuck,
half-rehabilitated when Tray had been around, now rotting with the seasons.
Even the tire replaced as a swing for Tray looked shriveled and lifeless as it
dangled in the light breeze. During that brief time of their having him, Tray
had, like Chuck, become Charlie's pup, and Charlie had responded with a flurry
of energy, putting the old pull wagon and sandbox in shape in a single weekend.
For him, the activity went a long way to assuage the grief of Chuck's death.

 He had even
been planning to buy another sailboat. She tried to laugh out loud at the
memory of the first one, but only a brief squawk came, more like a sob.
Originally dubbed
Molly's Thing
, it had soon become apparent that the
name was all wrong, and she had insisted it be changed to
Two Charlies
.
She had gone along most of the time at the beginning but finally succumbed to
the brutal fact that while Dramamine prevented the nausea of sea-sickness, it
also made her too drowsy to be any fun. By the time Chuck was ten, he and his
father were off alone on weekend cruises.

 He had
stenciled the words “Three Charlies” on Tray's reconditioned wagon, a true
harbinger of the sailboat to come. For some reason she found herself mesmerized
by the bitter-sweetness of the memories, and she did not turn away from Charlie
performing his now joyless chores among the dead and dying symbols strewn
about. There was the hoop of the basket attached to the garage wall, now
rusted, the basket shredded, where Charlie had taught Chuck to “dump the
b-ball”; the weathered warren cubbies where Charlie and Chuck had raised
rabbits until the population had become impossible to control; the grass rise
that they had flattened to make a well-drained place for Chuck's tent for
summer sleep-outs with his friends.

 Suddenly,
sensing her inspection, Charlie stopped, turned quickly, and shot her a puzzled
look. He was not smiling, nor did he wave, as if, having read her mind, he
disapproved of her watching him. Out of respect, she turned away and moved
back, out of sight.

 She poured
herself another cup of coffee and went into the den, where she planned to mark
a briefcase full of papers. How many nights and weekends had she spent on
papers? She wondered if she had used time wisely when Chuck was growing up, a
thought that had begun to gnaw at her since Frances and Tray had gone, as if
she had missed doing something that might have prevented what had happened.
Perhaps Chuck might still be alive? She shrugged away the question with a
silent rebuke.

 Sitting
opposite the gun cabinet that hung on the paneled wall, she found that somehow
its just being there was deflecting her concentration, nagging her to confront
it. She had hardly noticed it for years, although it was a routine feature of
her life to see Charlie polishing the stocks and cleaning the barrels
regularly, even though they hadn't been used since one of the last times Chuck
had come home to visit.

 Hunting,
boating, fishing, going to ball games. They were the expected rituals of
manliness. She had never questioned them. Indeed, such things were traditional
among the men in her family before she married. They were to be accepted, the
loneliness never resented.

 “Builds
self-reliance,” Charlie had assured her repeatedly, perhaps reacting to his own
uneasiness about leaving her alone on those occasions. Actually, in keeping
with her own early memories, she had welcomed the display of companionship, the
bonding of the male generations. It fulfilled the expectations of her
conditioning. In that environment girls giggled and sewed and cooked, and
those, like her, who wore glasses were excused their bookishness. Her mother
had lived her life ordering the men around, and they usually obeyed. But she
would never, never interfere or, even inadvertently, spoil their special
pleasure in manly pursuits.

 Of course,
the guns always frightened her to death, and no amount of reassurance on
Charlie's part ever chased away her fear when he and Chuck went off during the
season. They would bring back venison and rabbit already skinned and butchered
for cooking, which Charlie duly piled in the freezer with solemn mystical
allusions to the meaning of the hunt.

 “One must
kill only to eat,” he would intone, which was enormously hypocritical, since
they could buy all the meat they needed at the supermarket. She shivered,
remembering how that had set off that crucial argument with Peter. Then she
pushed it out of her thoughts.

 Once she had
come into the den to see him showing Tray how the guns worked. He had stood
behind the boy, holding the gun and showing him how to sight. Tray squinted
behind the stock and pulled the trigger.

 “Got 'em,”
Charlie had squealed, smiling at her. It was, she realized now, the very first
time he had smiled since Chuck had been reported dead. The memory confused her,
superimposed on a more ominous image of a dejected Charlie on the day after his
sixtieth birthday, before he had told her what actually happened on that day.
He was sitting in the den with Chuck's old hunting gun across his knees. He
hadn't heard her come in, although she had made no effort to muffle her
entrance. It was the way he held the gun that frightened her, one hand on the
stock, the other around the trigger guard, one finger unmistakably through the
loop. She had seen no cleaning things in sight, and she had scanned the room,
looking for a shell box.

 “What are you
doing, Charlie?” she had asked, bending to get a better look at his eyes, which
seemed fixed on an internal apparition. She had to shake his shoulder for him
to raise his head.

 “Just getting
ready to clean this,” he had responded, shaking his head as if that might
dissipate what was obviously a most unhappy daydream.

 “Didn't you
just clean that gun a couple of weeks ago?” She hadn't been sure, and she did
not want him to ignore her concern.

 “Never can
clean these damned things enough,” he had responded.

 Looking at
the gun case now brought back not only the memory but her uneasiness. She would
tell herself later that it was merely caused by her active imagination.

 Nevertheless,
it made her put up defenses against succumbing to her own depression. She owed
it to Charlie to keep her own spirits up. Therefore, she promised herself, she
would assume the role of cheerleader. There was not much choice in the
decision, since he was obviously not presently fit for that role. Also, she had
her work. In an odd way, one might say, she had her children, had always had
her children. To her, they were eternally fifth graders, still perched on the
better edge of innocence and, therefore, still available for love, complete
with hugs and kisses.

 Not that her
grief did not gnaw at her. But for her it wasn't just grief, it was the old
wounds of infertility that could bring her down, the terrible inadequacy that
had come from her difficulty in conceiving Chuck, a fact that had lent an awful
tension to at least ten years of their marriage. In that period, Charlie was
the cheerleader, as sweet and understanding a liar and hypocrite as ever there
was. She had, she knew, ruined his expectations for a larger family. Her own as
well. She alone was the defective—the humiliating tests of his potency always
revealed a sperm count that could father a nation.

 To see him
unhappy now, this wonderful, good, and loving man, had made her angry and
impatient with Frances and Peter for taking this cruel tack at exactly that
point when he—and she, too—needed the comfort of Tray most. Thankfully, she was
able to put it all aside for at least part of the day. Not like Charlie, in
whom it simmered at every moment of every hour.