Family Matters (23 page)

Betsy sat reading it over and over. She felt sick. She would have throttled Rachel if she could.

“Hot stuff, eh?” It was Crawford Divine standing behind her, balancing a cup of coffee and a doughnut on a book. He sat down and picked up the newspaper. “‘A brain of feathers and a heart of lead.' Very good, very good indeed, though she could have put it into context better.”

Betsy said nothing, sipping her coffee.

“Cheer up,” said Crawford. “You've been vindicated.” Adding quickly, “Not that you needed vindicating.”

“I just hope this is the end of it,” Betsy said finally, watching Crawford devour his doughnut He spilled sugar all over the table. She felt thoroughly depressed. Crawford Divine with his fat hands and flip remarks was part of her depression, and so was the shabby faculty lounge and the tepid coffee and her backache and the prospect of facing her students in ten minutes.

“You're embarrassed by this eulogy?” Crawford asked archly.

“I'm disgusted by the whole episode, Crawford. I feel like quitting teaching.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I mean it. I don't like being talked about. It was you who kept nattering on about my visibility, Crawford, but I was practically invisible until this started. Why should I suddenly be everybody's business? I can't tell you how many people have spoken to me about this, including people I don't even know. They stop me in the halls, students come up after class—”

“All in your favor, I assume.” He smirked as if he'd scored a point.

“Of course. The ones who think I'm a moral outrage just stare at me. But whether I'm stared at or defended it's an invasion of my privacy.” Her eyes filled with tears, making her angrier. This was what Crawford liked, an emotional scene where he could take charge.

“Betsy Betsy Betsy,” he crooned, meaning to soothe, and transferring sugar from his hand to hers with a few brief pats.

“Were you behind that letter, Crawford?” she demanded, pulling her hand away. “All that business about flaunting my condition?”

“Me?” He seemed genuinely shocked. “Behind that exercise in illogic and hot air?” He looked at her sadly. “‘Oh, Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.'”

“I'm not going to laugh, Crawford. I'm perfectly serious. Did you put the idea in that little bastard's head? He sounded like your echo.”

“Your condition has unsettled your brain,” he said curtly. “I told you I was on your side. You seem to remember everything I said but that. And if you can't take the heat, you should have kept your knickers on.”

He glared at her, picked up his book, and left.

There were no more letters, and the issue seemed to blow over, but it had brought Betsy into prominence and made it possible for people to talk to her frankly about a situation they had pussyfooted around before. She was overwhelmed with offers of secondhand baby necessities, midnight rides to the hospital, baby-sitting, moral support. She received letters of congratulation from both feminist organizations and right-to-lifers. Her seminar students looked pleased and secretive, and she had a horrible feeling they were planning some major gesture of support, like erecting a statue of her, belly and all, in front of the Hall of Languages.

“Why so depressed?” Roger asked her. “You've brought illegitimacy out of the closet and into the classroom.” He was buoyed by Rachel Grace's defense and its aftermath; it smacked of underground networks, the solidarity of the people. “You've become a good cause. We need causes. You're a public benefactor.”

“Please don't joke, Roger. I don't want to be a good cause. I just want to be left alone.”

“Acts of courage never go unsung.”

“What act of courage?” she asked desperately. “All I'm doing is having a baby. People do it every day and nobody calls them heroines. Why me? And Roger—” She hesitated. Everything she said lately sounded so dumb-innocent, it seemed either larger than life or calculated. She had never felt so alienated from her own utterances, as if she thought in English and it came out Russian. “Roger, do you think there's any danger of Rachel or any of these young women students glamorizing my situation to the point where they
would
imitate me? You know—go out and get themselves knocked up so they can be heroines? Because it's being made to look like a romantic sort of challenge?”

“How many of Joan of Arc's sympathizers leapt into the flames with her?”

“No, really. Tell me honestly. Am l a bad influence on these kids?”

“Where were you brought up? In a Henry James novel?” They were sitting in his office, and he leaned forward over his desk and took her shoulders in his two hands—an act of unprecedented intimacy. “Betsy, my dear, what you're doing is, like it or not, an act of character and courage that the average person simply isn't capable of.”

“I didn't want you to say that, Roger.”

“Of course you didn't!” He let her go and sat back in his chair, looking fed up. “Would I be giving you these fucking compliments if I suspected you of fishing for them?”

Betsy flushed and pressed her hands to her cheeks. “I'm sorry. I don't know how to handle this—being onstage.” She thought of Emily.

“What's so funny?”

“I was thinking of my grandmother,” she said, and she would have told him about Emily but she was too agitated to tell it coherently. It had been months since a man had touched her. She could still feel the pressure of his fingers on her shoulders.

All the autumn Emily had been calling once a week, except for when she was in England. “How is Violetta?” was always the first thing she asked. Betsy could hear the effort it cost her, the apprehension in her voice. As soon as Betsy answered, without detail, “about the same,” the subject was dropped, and Emily relaxed into chat.

She liked to hear about Betsy's life, and when she called on the Friday evening when Betsy was getting ready to go to dinner at the Blakes', Betsy told her about the furor at school.

“Well, maybe furor is too strong a word. Fuss is better. I've caused a bit of a fuss.”

“But that's monstrous, that letter!” Over the phone it was hard to remember that Emily was seventy-two. She sounded very much like Violet, or like Betsy herself, both of whom had inherited her clear, pleasing voice, but not the musical gift that went with it.

“Well, it's over now,” Betsy said. “I'm passing to oblivion as a rallying point the way the Chicago Seven did. Do you know, I have students who never heard of the Chicago Seven?”

“Who are the Chicago Seven?”

“Oh, Emily!”

“I'm teasing, dear. Those boys from the sixties, is that it? I hope all this nonsense at the university hasn't affected your health. I hope you're eating right How are your backaches?”

Betsy smiled to hear her. Emily was in the Pregnancy Club: great-grandmothers were members emeritus. “I get them, especially after I've taught all day.” It occurred to her that Emily was taking the place of the oblivious Violet.

“Do you need anything? Can I send you a crib? Some sleepers?”

“Nothing, thanks. I have enough stuff here for triplets.” It was true. For a heroine to refuse her laurels was unimaginable; she had accepted everything.

“Well, keep me posted,” Emily said, and signed off as she usually did, “Please give Violetta my dearest love.”

Easy talk, Betsy thought, hanging up. She couldn't help resenting Emily's aloofness, gracious and loving though it was, understandable though it might be. There she was up in East Haddam in her perfect little house, a comfort to her cats instead of to her daughter.

Quickly, Betsy finished dressing, then found herself with time to spare. She walked from room to room straightening things. She was messier alone than she had been with Judd. She had become used to his absence—or, rather, her apartment had reverted to the way it was a year ago, before they met. The bare spots had filled themselves up again. She had put his photo of the two of them in a drawer. It would, she understood, have been pathetic of her to keep it on the wall, even though it was for the baby's sake she wanted it there. She intended to be fair and open, up to a point, with her baby. “That's your daddy,” she would instruct it, but she didn't know where to go from there. “He walked out on me when he found out about you”? “He was a gypsy rover”? “He came to me in a dream”? She expected the child to look on its father as a fabulous being, like God or Santa Claus, to be believed in for its mother's sake—a father not unlike Betsy's own.

She put on her cape—a legacy of her days with Judd; he had bought it for her—and went out into the wind. The weather had gone cold. There was frost every morning where her garden used to be, a smell of snow in the air. The bone-chilling, soul-numbing upstate winter was on its way, but for once Betsy didn't mind much. She was six and a half months pregnant, and toting her burden around kept her warm and sweaty. She welcomed the cold. “You got big early, like I did,” Emily had said approvingly, ever on the watch for family similarities between herself and her granddaughter. She was perpetually amazed that Betsy had no theatrical ambitions, and neither sang nor danced nor played an instrument. “I do teach a course in Restoration drama,” Betsy told her hopefully, making Emily laugh.

Betsy walked to the Blakes' dinner party. Roger and Karen and their four children lived a couple of blocks from her in the ramshackle house with bicycles on the lawn. Betsy almost tripped over one in the near-dark. Their porch light was always ‘burned out. Roger opened the door, and light from within guided her up the steps. “Careful, dearie, you're walking for two,” Roger said, putting a hand under her elbow. She laughed and shook his arm away, and then there was what sounded like a tremendous roar of voices shouting, “Surprise!”

The Blakes' house was full of people grinning at her. Faculty from the university, graduate students, a couple of selected undergraduates, some people she didn't recognize. Roger opened champagne and gave Betsy the first glass, and people milled around her, drinking and offering her food.

“I don't understand this,” she said, taking a cracker from a basket. “What's the occasion?”

This was passed around as a choice piece of wit, and, Rachel Grace, who was standing beside her with a bowl of potato chips, said, “It's a baby shower, of course.”

It was the last tattered flag of her invisibility being torn down. Betsy caved in. She drained her glass and filled it again, and let people hug her. The ones she didn't know turned out to be members of the various organizations on campus who were applauding her stand. One of these, a tall girl who seemed alarmingly young but who was the head of Feminists for Free Choice, said as much.

“But I haven't taken any stand!” Betsy protested.

“This is a stand!” said the girl triumphantly, patting Betsy's belly.

“No—no, it isn't,” she said, stepping back. “I wish I could make that clear to everyone.”

“The fact that you don't see it is part of it!” said the girl, with shining eyes, and Betsy, who had begun to fear that her sense of humor was slipping, felt it coming back. But it did her no good. Earnest, determined faces surrounded her, congratulating her and talking seriously of heroism and progress and blows struck for freedom.

Across the room, Karen Blake was setting out more food on a long table. She was wearing an apron that said, “For this I spent four years in college?” and she looked frazzled from getting the kids out of the way before the party started. Betsy waved to her; Karen waved back with a jar of mustard in her hand and disappeared into the kitchen.

The Blakes were always giving parties, and Karen was always frazzled. Betsy had met Judd at the Blakes' New Year's Eve party. He had been brought by a friend of a friend of Karen's, whom he had deserted. He and Betsy had talked, and he had walked her home. It was freezing out. She invited him in for coffee and within ten minutes they were in bed. He moved in a week later. The Blakes had a stuffed owl named Harold stuck up on a ledge in the study, and it was in front of Harold that Judd had first kissed her. Betsy started to make her way over to Karen, to help with the food, and she wandered into the study en route. The owl stared angrily off into space. She remembered her pleased surprise, at being kissed like that without warning. And later, in her living room, Judd had taken off her clothes, she remembered, starting with her parka and boots. He had kissed her cold red knees. He had buried his face between her breasts and told her she had a body made for loving.

The den was empty except for herself and Harold. Betsy would have liked to sit quietly in the corner, drinking champagne, but she went out to the kitchen. “I hope this party doesn't just make things worse,” Karen said nervously. She was slicing bread, and she gave Betsy a jar of pickles to arrange in a dish. Karen had large, benevolent blue eyes that her children had inherited. As a family, they looked perpetually thoughtful and wondering. “Sometimes Roger's ideas are a bit extreme. But I do think it's better to bring it out in the open. I mean, it wasn't long ago when this would have been something shameful, something to be deplored.” She widened her wide eyes and said formally, “We want to show you that we rejoice with you.”

“I think it's wonderful of you, Karen,” Betsy said, making the pickles line up in rows. She had hoped for a lighter touch from Karen.

“Well, we think you're the wonderful one!”

Betsy persisted. “You shouldn't have done it—the champagne!”

Karen put her knife down and poured champagne for both of them from a bottle on the counter. “Everyone chipped in,” she said. “Do you know, these students are loaded! When we were in school everyone was so
poor
.” She caressed the bottle, with its New York State label.

“Speaking of which, you forgot to take off your apron,” said Betsy.