Family Matters (13 page)

“Lunch with Kramer, appointment with Jerry at two, and then—” He drained his coffee cup, clattered it down, and grinned. “Home early, I guess.”

The steam from the tea brought tears to her eyes, quickly blinked away. This was the way it would be—panic and relief, panic and relief, like a deathwatch. We must talk it out, she thought, get it straight. If you're going, go, leave me in peace. “Then I'll see you later,” she said, smiling radiantly and lifting her face to be kissed.

The late spring was full of rain. At the end of May Betsy planted her garden and watched the rain darken the brown soil. It washed up her lettuce plants, and she replanted, patting the damp earth around the roots and thinking of Judd, Judd, Judd. Before she met him, in her virginal spinster days, she had prided herself on keeping her solitary life turned outward, toward the world; now, with a man in captivity, her life had shrunk to a cage. Betsy pondered the irony of this fact, but she was helpless to fight it. There was even a sick happiness in bowing before it.

The days passed. He was kind to her—too kind, she thought when panic took her over. He wooed her as he had wooed Violet and Marion and her grandfather, but to what purpose she could not tell. Her head ached from the strain of figuring. Her back ached from bending over the garden plot. Every morning she retched, silently, invariably, and every evening she fought sleep, struggling to stay awake with Judd. Laughing, he would send her to bed and stay up alone, reading or watching television or listening to records while she lay awake long enough to wonder: what is he thinking? will he go out? what must I do?—before she fell into a thick, flannelly sleep from which she had trouble waking in the mornings.

They never spoke of her pregnancy. One night they went to the movies and saw
Three Women
. Judd left during the childbirth scene. He was waiting for her outside. “I just couldn't stand seeing you so excited,” he said. He had taken up smoking again.

“If it'll make you feel any better, the baby was born dead.”

“Oh, great.”

When she was with him she tried to read his face, and when he was away she analyzed it. She could think of nothing but Judd, Judd. Even the quest she'd set herself on her mother's behalf blurred before his name, and whenever a vague guilt or an equally vague sense of purpose came to her, the question of Judd sharpened into focus and drove everything else out. The quest for Emily had lost its immediacy; nor had she told her grandfather about her pregnancy. She must wait and see what Judd would do. She felt herself to be under siege, and she waited, as if for the decisive battle, gardening in the mornings and spending the afternoons in a daze with a book called
Your Guide to Pregnancy and Birth
, which she kept hidden.

They went regularly to the Saturday night dinners, but things did not go well. Judd was polite, but he was preoccupied and distant, with little appetite for Frank's steaks or for photographing Violet. She could see he disappointed them. The old team spirit returned, and Betsy sat helplessly in the lush garden, watching the people she loved best feint awkwardly at each other. She talked and talked—she became feverish with talking—to cover up Judd's silences, and her mother's.

Violet was changing, quieting, becoming absorbed in her illness, although Terry insisted there was no difference in her. The end could come suddenly, or it could creep up.… Betsy saw death creeping up on Violet like a predatory animal that stalked with incredible subtlety, whose cunning exceeded the human imagination—and Violet was falling into its clutches without a fight.

She had stopped calling in the night—she was on a new kind of sleeping pill—but when one night she finally did call, Betsy slept through the ringing and Judd answered. He shook her urgently.

“It's three o'clock in the morning and your mother's on the phone. She doesn't sound good.”

Violet was whispering. “Betsy? Oh, I had the worst dream, honey. Mrs. Foster is in the john. Have you found my mama?”

The next day Violet had no memory of the phone call, and on the morning after that Betsy forced herself to drive down to the library.

She hadn't been inside the public library in years, not since she'd been teaching at the university. But she remembered it well—the worn-down marble steps, the locked cabinet of biology texts, the odd characters reading newspapers, the grimy oak. She and Violet used to go there on Saturdays and pick out books, a volume or two of Mazo de la Roche for Violet,
Betsy-Tacy
or
Freddy the Detective
for Betsy. It was something private she and her mother did; Helen never read a book (barring the Bible and her Sunday missal), and Frank read chiefly newspapers and briefs. The library was hers and Violet's.

She found a book called
Digging Out Your Past
. It was illustrated with line drawings of a happy family searching busily through libraries and newspaper files and old photograph albums. They looked like people in
New Yorker
cartoons except that they weren't doing anything funny. In the end, they found great-great-great-aunt Louisa and great-great-great-uncle Frederick, who were represented in oval tintypes, looking just like Mom and Pop. On the last page, the happy family lined up, proudly rooted beneath their family tree.

It wasn't very helpful. Genealogical research wasn't what she was engaged in. It was more like a search for a missing person.… Should she go to the police? Hire a detective? Put notices in newspapers?

She couldn't rise to such melodrama. She looked in the card catalog again; not surprisingly, there were no books about finding missing persons. She was baffled—she was used to turning to books for what she needed—and she was also, unexpectedly, personally let down. Looking at the happy cartoon people, with their children and their ancestors all around them, she understood that the search for Emily was as much hers as Violet's. It was a search for her baby's family. An only child, fatherless, her mother dying, Betsy was without relatives. She hadn't properly taken it in before, but in the library she did. She saw herself telling her child, someday, about Emily. Her child would tell her grandchildren: “Once upon a time, my mother set out to find her mother's mother, whose name was Emily.…”

She put the book back on the shelf, feeling urgency. She must find Emily before Emily died, too, and took all the secrets with her. She got out her notes. On Violet's blue stationery she had added the facts gleaned from the letters, a sorry and tenuous few:

hated by Helen (why?)

healthy and cooperative at time of birth

gave birth Dec. 1922, Haddam, Ct. (probably)

Aunt M. brought baby to Syracuse? Jan. 1923?

(She had taken great pleasure in writing “gave birth” and “time of birth” and “baby.”) She read the notes through again, mulling over possible unravelings. There wasn't much to go on. What she needed was Emily's last name, and all she had was a hint and an address. Was there some kind of directory? She thought of city directories—the
Times
article mentioned them—and walked over to the courthouse from the library.

I should be good at this kind of detective work, she told herself. She had been promoted to associate professor on the strength of her annotated edition of a diary kept by Rose Deasy, the literate wife of a Grub Street hack who had known Samuel Johnson and other members of the Ivy Lane Club in 1749. The work had required a six-month sabbatical, a small grant from the Johnson Society, and painstaking research, over the course of two years, in the British Museum and the libraries of three American universities. It had brought her a paradoxical reward: great fame in circles no one had ever heard of (including, as an offshoot, a review in a feminist journal that tried unpersuasively to turn Rose Deasy into an inspirational, emancipated heroine). Almost as much as on the obscure fame, Betsy had thrived on the task.

But this one, considerably less complex (though also less clear-cut) and with considerably more at stake (the peace of mind of her dying mother, whom she loved), was making her weary before she'd ever begun it.
Your Guide to Pregnancy and Birth
put it succinctly: “Many pregnant women find it difficult to wrench their minds away from what's happening to their bodies long enough to cope with the practical world. You may find yourself in a perpetually dreamy state during part or all of the nine months.” That was it exactly, and ever since she'd read the passage it was doubly true. Walking to the courthouse, she wasn't planning strategy; she was looking at the petunias in the park, and thinking, Next year at petunia time I'll be wheeling my baby. She went slowly, already adopting the pregnant woman's back-tipped goose walk, engrossed by passing mothers and children. Her breasts were swollen and tender, and she fancied her waist had thickened. She thought pregnancy would look good on her, regretting that she'd have no man to appreciate it. Somewhere in the back of her head a voice said, He's not gone yet, he's still hanging around, he may decide to stay—but Betsy tried not to hear. She would ignore all the inner voices and concentrate on her task. But the mysterious Emily Lofting, or Loftig, at times so real to her, had a way of receding and giving way to the greater reality, the half-inch fetus in her womb.

At the county clerk's office she was sent back to the library for the city directories. Damn. Trudging down the hall again, she stopped on an impulse at a door labeled “Family Court: Adoptions.” Inside, she was told by a young man in a bow tie that all adoption records were sealed, unavailable.

“Even from that far back?” The
Times
article had said that barriers could be breached with charm and
chutzpah
. “I mean, the people involved are all dead. What harm would there be?”

The young man in the bow tie didn't seem charmed. “You can try to get a court order to have the papers released,” he said. “But there would have to be a good reason.” He was chewing gum, and he gave it a snap.

Defeated, she went back to the library, and there, in the Local History and Geneaolgy room on the second floor, Emily leapt into existence.

There was half a wall of city directories, and in the volume labeled 1922 there was a listing for 668 Spring Street that read: “Harold Loftus (Cora), motorman.” Betsy stared in disbelief at the page. There they were, documented, Emily's parents, Violet's maternal grandparents, her own great-grandparents, her baby's great-great … Her mind whirled. She couldn't get over it. Harold and Cora Loftus. They sounded like real people. She could even see them: Harold with a paunch, Cora in a bun. Good, conventional people, the motorman and his wife. Motorman? She asked the man behind the desk: “What was a motorman?”

“Probably a streetcar driver or conductor,” he said, peering at the book with her.

“It's my great-grandfather!” she said happily, and he smiled at her, but it wasn't an enthusiastic smile. He was used to discoveries.

Betsy sat down at a table with the directory. She liked looking at the words: “Harold Loftus (Cora), motorman.” And there, at 666, was her grandfather—or, rather, not her grandfather, but: “Francis Robinson (Helen), lawyer.” It was inexpressibly exciting. What a pity they didn't include the names of children: Emily, the Loftus girl.… Betsy saw her in the spring, in a dress with a dropped waist, sitting on the front porch of a little frame house trimmed with fish scaling and a trellis, wishing for her real life to begin.… It was Violet's vision; now she would accept it as truth.

Betsy bloomed with excitement. She strode back to her car, briskly plotting. The petunias might have been parking meters. She knew Emily's name. It wasn't a lot to know, but it was more than she'd known an hour ago. She felt, somehow, that she would find Emily; for the first time she believed in her. Every year, she read to her students Boswell's “Inviolable Plan,” part of which read, “Be firm, and persist like a philosopher.” Boswell didn't often follow his own advice, but it was good advice all the same. She would be firm, she would persist like a philosopher, and she would find Emily.

Where to go next? She would check the Haddam, Connecticut, records in the county courthouse—what county? She'd look it up. She could picture that, too: a pretty little Greek Revival or Victorian Gothic building on a square of green, and inside it somewhere the birth record of a baby girl born to Emily Loftus in December 1922. She would write and ask for a copy. Or would she have to make a trip up there?—to one of those marzipan New England towns, all clapboards and historical markers. She and Judd could go, perhaps. They would walk hand in hand down the narrow streets.…

She pictured Violet's transfigured face: a name, a birth certificate, a mama … perhaps not least, a daughter who delivered the goods.

Feeling righteous, she drove home to find Judd at the kitchen table drinking beer, wearing the kind of fixed smile he discouraged on the faces of photographic subjects.

“You look weary,” she said, flopping into a chair. But it was she who was weary. It was coming, she knew, and she was tired, all her exhilaration gone, as if she had already gone through the ordeal ahead.

“I don't like confrontations, Betsy,” he said. “I spend my life avoiding them. But it's time you and I talked.”

He spoke awkwardly, shy with her, and she responded with silence.

“Why did you do this to us?” he asked, and when she saw the effort it cost him she had no answer.

“It was my turn,” she said without thinking, and looked quickly at him, surprised at herself.

Curiously, he understood. “Because of your mother?”

She knew he didn't like to speak of it—Violet's dying, or anyone's—and she nodded at his oblique reference. They faced each other across the table, drinking cold beer. She was pleased, and then stricken with remorse, to see how unhappy he looked—unhappy and too young to be a father, Betsy thought, wondering if he felt the same way. He was barely thirty, four years younger than she; and yet she always thought of him as far, far older, though this never kept her from feeling maternal not only toward his child but toward him.