Black Diamond (2 page)

Long ago opera had taken the place of a friend. Now that he had someone of his own, he hadn’t lost his affection for it, but its
use had changed. It supplemented his life, where before it had been a substitute. Jean had become his life. And he was living for the first time, as if he’d just woken up, having slept to his music all the time when he might have taken part in the world.

Eventually, after several months, Jean got pregnant. She didn’t tell anyone. Even though her period had never come late before, she hoped and expected and prayed that it was late just this once, and it would come at any moment. When it was three weeks late she still hoped, doggedly and miserably. She threw up twice – once after she’d been drinking, so that didn’t count. Her breasts began to hurt. But she told herself that if something had gone wrong with her period, she’d probably feel strange symptoms anyway.

Eleven days after she’d missed the second period, she told William she thought she might be pregnant. She might be; in fact, she was sure now: she was. She’d have to have an abortion straight away. How could she get one – what could they do?

William was so amazed that for a while he could only say, ‘It’s all right.’ Then he told her he blamed himself for not trying to be more careful. He wasn’t the one who’d get stuck, so he hadn’t worried. He should have thought about her. Now that it had happened, he said, he wanted her to have the baby. It was his; he was proud of that. And it was natural. To do anything against that, he figured, would be somehow wrong. He was stunned by the idea of a new life that the two of them had made together. ‘Because we loved each other,’ he said. The only reason why she didn’t want to have it was that all the people in town were such hyprocrites: wasn’t it? She was afraid that they’d take it out on her, start talking about morality and do a lot of preaching at her. But everything was going to be all right. He wouldn’t let them.

It wasn’t going to be easy. He could imagine how bad things would be for her. He’d known for a long time how strongly society felt that any kind of love outside marriage, and
sometimes
within marriage, was bad. The physical expression was bad. In fact, the emotion itself, the idea, was suspect. Platonic love could sometimes be the worst, because it bound two souls together regardless of age, sex, color, belief or marital status. The
movies you could see in town were almost as repressed as real life; people were given their just deserts if they stepped out of line by a fraction. You only saw how beautiful love could be – the way everybody their age knew it had to be – if you could get to a foreign movie, where they showed people in their underwear and sometimes even, from far away, naked; at least, the women.

It would be bad for her, but it was going to be bad for him, too. Once people knew, the small town would close against him. It had never had anything in common with people like him, anyway.

As for her, she knew that what had happened to her was the end of a girl, unless she got married. Everybody knew what became of girls who got pregnant: everyone talked about them and the girls went away forever, or they came back later and no one talked about where they’d been. They were like women who had died.

If she got married, then it would be all right. She would escape from her parents, who were wrong about everything anyhow, and she’d be with William. He won her over. She’d do anything for him. He’d tell his parents. They wouldn’t be able to fight it; they’d have to let him marry her in one of those states where the age-limit was lower. And if his father and mother accepted that, the rest of the town would, too.

He talked to her parents. They were impressed by him and by his family. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘we’re married.’ But Jean’s mother thought, despite everything, it was a terrible shame – the ruin of at least two lives – for a girl to have a baby at such a young age: she’d be only just sixteen when it was born. And Jean’s father got to thinking there should be some legal safeguard for his daughter, so that in three or four years’ time, or even ten, she and the child would be provided for. Young men sometimes changed their minds.

‘I’ll see to all that,’ William said. He was still only seventeen. He wouldn’t be eighteen till the spring. He hadn’t told his own parents anything yet. Knowing them and their views about who was or wasn’t worthwhile, he’d prejudged their reactions and chosen, for the moment, not to speak out. In any case he’d
wanted to be with Jean when she had to face her mother and father. The money he’d have when he was eighteen wasn’t much, but it was enough to start out on. If he had to, he could handle everything all by himself, though he’d rather have his parents’ help. He’d rather have them understand, too.

He was still mulling over the wording of the speech that would overwhelm his parents, when he was beaten to the punch by Jean’s father.

Her father had first of all let his daughter know what he thought of her. ‘This is all the thanks we get,’ he’d said. His wife backed him up. Jean ran upstairs, crying, and slammed her door, leaving her parents to talk about what should be done.

Her father decided there ought to be a discussion between all four parents on the matter of financial arrangements. He
telephoned
William’s father. He assumed that the man knew what was going on.

Jean’s father talked to William’s father for twelve minutes. He brought up the subjects of rent, food, clothes, the price of baby carriages, hospitals, and so on.

William’s father didn’t say much, except that he’d remember all the points raised: he’d have to go over them with his wife before he could say anything definite. He left the office
immediately
. He went into conference at home with his wife. Together they greeted William on his return from school.

He opened his heart to them. They closed theirs to him. They told him that he had no idea how difficult it could be for a young couple with a baby – especially hard for a girl, who would have to become a mother before learning how to be a wife.

‘We know that already‚’ William said. ‘What it means to be man and wife. We don’t need a piece of paper.’

‘Without the piece of paper, and without being the right age, the child may not be legally yours,’ his father told him. ‘Or hers.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘You can prove you’re not the father of a child, but it’s impossible to prove that you are. You didn’t know that, did you?’

‘I guess so,’ William said. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘She’s still considered to be under the care of her parents. And
now her father’s trying to get money out of us. He called me up at the office, started talking about hospital bills and the price of maternity clothes and everything. He seemed to think I knew all about it.’

William was sorry about that, he said; he’d been racking his brains, wondering how to tell them: he’d known from the beginning that they didn’t like Jean.

His parents denied it; they had nothing against the girl. Of course not. But as things stood now … Well, there were so many difficulties.

If they wanted to, his father told him, her parents could get really nasty. She was still a minor. If William were one year older, they could charge him with rape on the mere fact of her age, and send him to jail. Even as it was, they could put her into some kind of reform school until she was eighteen. For immorality.

‘That’s crazy,’ William said. ‘And disgusting.’

‘It’s the law.’

‘Then the law is crazy. It ought to be changed.’

‘Maybe so. But it isn’t changed yet.’

William wanted to know what people were doing, passing laws like that: were they all religious bigots? Even bigots went to bed with each other; or did they just want to stop everybody else from doing it?

Laws, his father said, usually had some sense to them. This particular one was meant to protect people who had no defences: to prevent men from fooling around with young girls who didn’t know how to take care of themselves and who wouldn’t be able to raise a child on their own.

‘But this isn’t like that‚’ William said.

‘Nothing is ever like the textbook case till somebody takes it to court, and then it’s got to be argued like the book, because that’s the only way you can figure out how to deal with it.’

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with other people.’

‘Could you support a wife and child right now?’

‘Yes,’ William said, wanting to win the argument.

His father didn’t tell him he was wrong. He simply pointed out how hard it would be, and added that the kind of salary and
career available to a college graduate was a lot better than what a man could hope to work up to after five years of living from hand to mouth. William thought that over. He saw that he’d have to have his parents’ help. He knew he’d be able to count on them as long as he fell in with most of their advice.

He began to believe he might have been wrong about the way he’d handled the talk with Jean’s parents. If that was the line they were going to take, they weren’t worth considering, but naturally Jean would want to think there was an excuse for them. He also felt ashamed of not having trusted his own parents, who both appeared so reasonable, and so worried; they weren’t angry at all.

His parents worked on him, in perfect counterpoint, until he agreed that he wouldn’t see Jean for two weeks. It was an unsettling time for everybody, they said. Two weeks would be enough of a breathing-space to get everything straightened out. They asked him not to telephone Jean during that period; they wanted a free hand. They didn’t put a ban on letters, since his mother had long ago searched his room and found the letters Jean had written to him. Nowhere in them had there been a hint of the pregnancy, but in one letter Jean had written something about the ornamental stone jar in which the two of them had started to hide their more fervent correspondence: the jar stood at a corner of the crumbling terrace wall that bounded three sides of the old Sumner house. The house had been shut up for years. Weeks before she could have known that the letters would make any difference to her life, William’s mother knew the look of Jean’s handwriting. She knew it nearly as well as she knew her son’s.

William wrote a letter to Jean. In it he told her about the talk he’d had with his parents. Things would turn out all right – there was nothing any parent could do to keep them apart for long, but he didn’t want her to imagine he’d stop thinking about her if they just didn’t see each other for a few days. They were always going to be together in their thoughts. And he hoped she’d stay certain; even though they were close in spirit, he was a little afraid of her parents’ influence. He was especially worried that she might be
persuaded to think everything he and she had done together was bad.

He put the letter inside the terrace urn. His mother retrieved it. She then made a surprisingly good forgery of Jean’s handwriting on paper she had bought that day. Each pale pink sheet was printed at the upper left-hand corner with a picture of forget-
me-nots
tied up in blue ribbon. The paper had been a lucky find: she’d bought a whole box; it was the same kind Jean wrote her letters on. William would never suspect his mother of using such paper.

The forged letter asked why his parents couldn’t help out with the money, because her father was getting really mad about it and, actually, she was beginning to wonder, too; after all, he wasn’t the one who was going to have the baby. Anyway, her father had told her that William’s father had said something about her, something kind of insulting, so she realized that William had been
discussing
her
with
his
parents.
She thought that was a pretty cheap thing to do; in fact, it was measly.

William’s mother was proud of her letter. She thought she’d hit the tone, the phrasing and the slang just right. Her pleasure was malicious, but her purpose wasn’t. She believed that William had been maneuvered into fatherhood by a girl from a family of no background; and that if events were allowed to take their course, he’d hate the girl in a few years. It would be better to break up the affair now.

His father too was ready to protect William. He’d run across men like Jean’s father before. He telephoned back and laid it on the line: he and his wife had no responsibility towards a girl who said she was pregnant by their son. Attempts to extort money out of their family – phoning him at his office, yes – could end in criminal prosecution. Naturally Jean’s father was free to try to prove that some compensation was owed. But if there were to be a legal battle, money would win it in the end.

Jean’s father felt a deep sense of unfairness and injury after the phone call; he felt it more and more as he continued to brood about it. Every time you tried to make excuses for people like that, he thought, they turned around and ran true to type. They
had no respect for other families. They considered themselves better than other people. He couldn’t quite bring himself to face the fact that it had been a disastrous move to raise the question of money, and that by doing so he had probably wrecked his daughter’s hopes of marriage. He’d never really had anything against William, only against the double sin of sexual trespass and pregnancy. But he’d been intimidated. He didn’t like the idea that somebody in his family could end up in a law court. They’d always been law-abiding – all of them.

He told his wife that it wasn’t going to be the way they’d hoped; they couldn’t expect any help from the boy’s parents. They’d have to start thinking about those doctor and hospital bills, not to mention the embarrassment of having to go on living in the town afterwards. Jean’s mother got scared. She had never done anything underhand or shameful; she’d worked hard and made a good home for her family. And if Jean didn’t get married now, it would be her parents’ lives that would be destroyed, not hers.

She had a little talk with her daughter. She told her that no matter how things went, Jean wasn’t to worry: it still wasn’t too late to do something about it.

Jean pretended to be reassured. She wrote a long letter to William, asking him what was going on at his house, and telling him that her mother had changed, and wanted her to get rid of the baby. She had to talk to him, she said.