Family Matters (16 page)

“I thought he'd marry me,” she said simply.

“God damn the man!”

Betsy caught his arm again; having visions of shotguns and vendettas, her grandfather dragging Judd to some altar and flinging them together. “No—it's all right. Honestly it is. It's not his fault. I deceived him.”

“He didn't deserve you.”

She looked at him gratefully. She was still his Betsy, then. But she must put him right. “It's not that simple, Grandpa. He just wasn't ready. It didn't work out the way I thought it would.”

“He's a scoundrel!”

“He's not!”

He held up his hand like a traffic cop: enough of Judd. There was a pause before he spoke again, and Betsy steeled herself. This would be his official, patriarchal last word on the subject. He would not refer to it, willingly, again. But he would expect her to abide by what he said. The act of stiffening herself against him made her miserable. She was used to bending, to melting, to merging with her grandfather's superior mind and its superior wisdom. Even Judd, a potential discord, had not challenged its hold on her. Her grandfather, she realized, had sensed Judd's impermanence—as she should have sensed it herself. But a baby—an illegitimate baby, she amended, thinking of Emily—that could not be harmonized, not yet, anyway. (Oh, wait until he held the little thing, wait until it called him Grandpa!) She waited, ready to defend the baby in her womb with her last breath.

“Betsy,” her grandfather said finally. “I think you are foolhardy and headstrong.” There was another pause, during which she contemplated, half-amused, the old-fashioned words: Judd was a scoundrel, she was foolhardy and headstrong. He went on more angrily, sensing her detachment. “I dispprove of this whole thing. I think you're crazy to go through with it. It could ruin your career. It could ruin
you
. You don't know what you're doing. It's not easy to bring up a child, even with two parents. You're not considering the reality of it, the day-to-day reality—and the humiliation.”

“I don't feel any humiliation. I've told the Brodskys, and they rallied round beautifully, Grandpa.”

He brushed it aside. “And then the baby, growing up without a father—under that cloud.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake! What cloud?” She was furious with him—she could not recall ever having been so furious. “It's all in your mind—
your
mind, your generation. None of my own friends will think twice about it. There are plenty of kids growing up with only one parent—and who's to say I won't get married someday?”

“Who would have you, after this?”

They stood glaring at each other, and then she started for the kitchen door. He called out, “I'm sorry, Betsy. Come back here. Let me finish.”

She came back and sat down at the table, fiddling with the saltshaker. Eternally, a saltshaker would remind her of Judd; she put it down. Outside, in the yard, she could hear Marion's loud voice, talking grocery prices, and the softer, vague tones of Violet.

“All right,” Frank said, keeping his voice low. He sat down across from her. “All right. Certainly you may marry someday, and certainly the child may not suffer from its situation if you don't. I know things are different. But don't take those chances, Betsy. You're right—it's my great-grandchild and I want what's best for it. But I want what's best for you most of all. Have the baby. I can see you're determined, and I think you're right to be. I admire you for it. But then give it up, Betsy.” He covered her hand with his; it felt old and dry and cold. “Let it be adopted. The world is full of nice people who want babies. I know—I've worked with plenty of them over the years. Give the baby up for adoption, Betsy.”

She waited for more, but he was through. He's not going to tell me, Betsy thought. Even in a moment like this, he's not going to tell me my mother is adopted. She looked sadly at him, overcome for an instant with pity and affection, and turned her hand up to grip his.

“No, Grandpa,” she said. “I want the baby. I'll be a good mother. I'll be just as good alone as any two nice people would be together. You wait and see.”

“You'll smother it!”

She suppressed her anger. “I know that's a danger,” she said. “I have thought about it. But I'll try hard.”

Her hand left his and stole to her belly, resting there below her belt. His gaze followed it. “I'll love it,” she said.

He turned away. “You know my feelings.”

She sat bemused. The important thing was under her hand, under her skin, swimming through its dark world toward life. She cradled it. Was this what Emily had felt? And yet she had given it up, surrendered it to two nice people. Helen! Imagine giving this baby up to Helen! Betsy stood suddenly and got the wine bottle and two glasses.

“Come on, Grandpa. Toast me.” She clanked her glass against his and he drank grimly, as if he needed it.

Before they left the kitchen, she said, “I still don't understand why Grandma would want ‘Violetta.' It's a fallen woman's name, not a saint's.”

Tell me, she pleaded silently. Tell me about Emily. It's wrong not to tell me.

But he only looked exasperated. “Your grandmother insisted on Mary for a middle name. Violetta Mary. All right?”

“It's really a weird name,” she said, but what was really weird was the way he put it: “Helen
insisted
.” … I'll bet Emily named her, Betsy thought triumphantly. We'll find her in spite of you.

“Drop it, Betsy. Okay?”

“Okay, Gramps.” She grinned at him and put her arm through his. “Cheer up. You'll get used to it. I want you to be happy, for my sake.”

“You always were a doozie,” he said, shaking his head from side to side like an old man.

Her intuitions, while interesting, weren't useful. Emily might well have given Violet her outlandish name, but Betsy's inquiry progressed no further. She waited impatiently for information from the Middlesex County Courthouse. When it came, it was a mimeographed letter that said: “Thank you for your inquiry. We regret we cannot process it without your remitting the sum of ($2.50).” There was a form enclosed for her to fill out; she had to give her relationship to Violet Loftus and her reasons for wanting the birth certificate. “Daughter,” she wrote. “Family records.”

She mailed it with a check and continued to wait, cursing her own inefficiency. I should go to Connecticut, she thought. But she hated to leave Violet. Her mother's condition seemed to have stabilized again, but she was decidedly weaker, and her placidity was simple loss of energy. There were certain things she refused to do, like be helped down the stairs for dinner. “No more,” she said irritably, clinging to her bedcovers. A table was set up in her room, and Frank ate his meals up there with her while she had a tray in bed. The Saturday dinners were held there, too, with everyone crowded around the table and Violet on the bed as if on a throne.

Betsy saw her almost every day. “I feel so weak and empty,” she confided once, but she got no worse, and the pain wasn't bad yet, though sometimes she said her legs hurt so, she felt she'd just taken a long hike. Once a week, Frank still drove her to the hospital for treatment; her kind of cancer was supposed to respond well to therapy, but the doctors were discouraged: it didn't. Violet opposed the hospital visits.

“They tire me so,” she complained. “I'd feel better without them.”

“They might help, Violet,” Frank said to her.

“They won't,” said Violet calmly. She seemed truly to know. “They just make me sicker. It's not dying I mind, Dad. It's being disturbed.”

Nor would she go into the hospital. “I'll die at home, thanks,” she said, and when for a while there was talk of radiation therapy, surgery, she wouldn't even discuss it. But that was given up, finally, as futile by the doctors.

Betsy agreed with her mother. If her disease was incurable, why did they persist in trying to cure it, or in trying to prolong what was to become an agony? To tame the wild beast inside her? But, for the moment, at least, the visits to the hospital continued. Sometimes Betsy took her, and once while Violet was with the doctor she took the elevator down to the maternity floor.

“Can we help you?” asked a nurse at the desk.

“I'm expecting a baby,” Betsy said. “I just wanted to look around.”

The nurse was interested and helpful; they were both members of the Pregnancy Club, though in different capacities. “You can arrange to have a tour of the whole thing—labor and delivery rooms, and the nursery. Through your doctor.”

Her doctor hadn't suggested it. Betsy was still trying to persuade him that she wasn't a special case, that she was looking forward to her baby as much as any respectably married woman. From down the hall came a baby's cry, and she caught herself exchanging smiles with the nurse.

“It won't be long,” the nurse said encouragingly: one of the Club mottoes.

Betsy paid close attention to the changes in her body, charmed by them. She loved the round, smooth belly she was getting, and the way her breasts had firmed into globes. She felt as luscious and desirable as a basket of ripe fruit; at times she was moved to tears by her unplucked beauty, and her loneliness.

She tried not to think of Judd—as an ex-smoker tries not to dwell on thoughts of lighting up, and inhaling, and sitting back, relaxed, with a cigarette to tap on the edge of an ashtray. She tried not to adjust her route so that she drove by his studio. She only did it once; seeing his bicycle chained in front, she was sick with longing. She tried not to miss him, but she did. She didn't miss the vigilant, submissive lover she had had to be; that role she was glad to reject, and she promised herself she would never dwindle to it again. But she missed
him
, the excitement of his rough edges.

Already, though, the baby was company. She perceived it as a real individual to be reckoned with. It had a heart that beat, fingernails, a sex (female, she prayed confidently), knees, brain, eyes. It got bigger, and she obligingly got bigger to accommodate it, and she walked naked around her apartment the better to admire the hospitable architecture of her body.

In August, she had to buy a pair of maternity jeans. She stopped tucking in her blouses. “You look sloppy,” Violet said to her, but she noticed nothing else. Betsy wanted to keep it from her as long as possible.

“She'll worry,” she and Frank said to each other, but there was something else as well, which neither of them voiced. She might not live long enough to see her grandchild.

“I wish she didn't have to know at all,” said Betsy.

“It might do her good,” said Aunt Marion, who had been told before she guessed, which miffed her. “In the midst of death we are in life.”

“No,” Betsy and Frank said together, and Marion shrugged. “You know best,” she said skeptically.

Violet called Betsy perhaps once a week in the middle of the night, while Mrs. Foster—who had been lectured and no longer napped, but sat alertly in the easy chair, knitting—was out of the room.

“I can't sleep, Betsy,” she would whisper. “Have you found my mama?” Sometimes she had a dream. “I'm so lost, honey. Where's my mama?”

Betsy was keeping her posted. She confided her suspicion that Emily had chosen her name herself. “She was an opera lover, Mom. Isn't that exciting? It's the first real thing we know about her.”

“We don't know, Betsy.” Violet was unwilling to speculate; she wanted facts, progress, an old woman at her bedside.

“Well, I think it's an excellent deduction. I'm quite proud of it.”

Violet stuck out her lower lip and shook her head. Slowly, she reached for a chocolate, took a bite, and put it back. “Not very useful, though.”

A letter finally came from Connecticut. It was, indeed, Violet's birth certificate, xeroxed. It revealed that Violetta Loftus had been born to Emily Loftus in the town of East Haddam on December 20, 1922. The spaces for the father's vital statistics were blank, as expected. Betsy wondered for the first time who he'd been, and wasn't surprised that Violet didn't seem to care. “Female adoptees,” the
Times
article had stated, “almost invariably concentrate on finding their mothers.” And then, Violet had no need of a father; Frank had been a “real” father to her as Helen hadn't been a mother.

She waited until privacy was absolute, and then she showed the document to Violet. “It's you, Mom! You were born!”

Violet smiled. “It's Emily.” She rubbed her finger over the name.

“Our first real proof of her existence. And look—it gives her date of birth; she was born in 1905. She was only seventeen when she had you.”

Violet smiled. “April 9, 1905. She's younger than Grandpa.”

“She's only seventy-two.”

“Can you find her, Betsy?” Violet clutched Betsy's hand in both of hers.

“I'll try, Mother.”

“Find her for me, honey.”

“I will.” But Betsy's heart was sinking. She had to admit (though not to her mother) that she'd come to a dead end. Emily existed, she might even be alive still, she'd given birth to Violet fifty-five years ago in a Connnecticut River town. And except for a brief return appearance in 1941, she'd vanished from the face of the earth.

Betsy tried to think it through. Where would she go? What would she do, bereft of her baby, in disgrace? Presumably she'd returned to Harold and Cora, and moved away with them—but where? And she had probably married at some point. The possibilities were appalling. She could be any Emily, anywhere.

For the moment, Betsy was stymied, and there was another problem occupying her. It was already August, she had a potbelly that wouldn't be able much longer to pass for overweight, and school would be starting early in September.

She called Crawford Divine, the chairman of the English department and requested a meeting. He had a presumptuous way of sounding immensely flattered when he was asked anything, as if he believed that people simply wanted his attention or his company, which was sometimes not the case.