Fashionably Late (66 page)

And wasn’t it telling that Karen had felt no worse there than she had anywhere else?

Karen reminded herself that she had gotten this information illegally, and that Mrs. Marie Botteglia might be living in terror of this moment, a terror even greater than Karen’s own. She may refuse to talk to me, she may scream at me. She may not acknowledge me at all, Karen told herself. After what Belle had done to her, Karen wondered if she could bear another rejection. The burden of rejection that an adopted child carries for life would never go away.

But then she felt herself laying the burden down or, more accurately, giving it up. It seemed that merely standing there, only a few dozen yards from her real mother, had the power to melt the boundaries, the glass wall, that had always separated her from everyone else. From Belle, who had never been adequate, from Lisa, who had been the “real” daughter, from friends, who were kind but weren’t adopted, from Arnold, who was distant, from Jeffrey, who had always looked down on her, and from all the people who she had been the employer to. Her separateness seemed to melt into the thin air of the suburban street and she almost laughed aloud. Her aloneness had been such a trial for so long, but somehow she had known that she could feel differently. Somehow she had known that this moment could be achieved. Now she found the courage to walk down the narrow cement path to the door of 2881. She was forty-two years old, and was doing this so much later than others, but then she had always been fashionably late.

There was an illuminated doorbell button. Over it, in a neat but faded print, she could read the name: Mr. & Mrs. Alfredo Botteglia. Karen stuck out her mar icured finger and pressed the bell.

Marie Botteglia was very short. She opened the door with a jerk of her arm and looked up to Karen, who was at least eight inches taller than she. Marie looked younger and better than she had in the snapshots, her hair neatly pulled back into a low ponytail, her face pleasant, and a lot less lined than it had seemed in the pictures from the shopping plaza parking lot. The woman looked at her. “Yes?” she asked.

“My name is Karen Kahn,” Karen said. She held out the bent photo to Marie. “I wondered if you could identify this picture.”

Marie Botteglia frowned and then, deciding it was safe enough, reached out to take the snapshot out of Karen’s hand. For a moment, Karen felt the woman’s fingers touch her own and she felt an almost electrical shock. Now she had seen, heard, and touched her mother.

Marie fumbled for the reading glasses that hung around her neck. She didn’t bother to push them all the way up her nose before turning the photo around and glancing at it. Then her face changed, went pale, and she glanced back at Karen and then down to the photo again.

“My baby?” she asked. And Karen nodded. Marie opened her arms. “My baby!” she said. And Karen fell into the comfort.

They both cried, of course. Then Karen had to give a brief explanation, and Marie kept shaking her head and mopping her eyes. “I can’t believe you remembered,” she kept saying. She also kept touching Karen, patting her knee, taking her hand, evenţshylyţrubbing her back as they sat side by side on the little sofa in the dim living room.

Karen couldn’t help but think of Belle and how rarely she’d touched Karen at all. Marie had kissed her, and run her hand down Karen’s cheek. “I can’t believe you found me,” she said over and over again.

“I’m tickled half to death.” At last she got up to make a pot of coffee and carried in a plate of biscotri. “Just from a can,” she apologized. “I didn’t know you were coming.” They both giggled.

Now they had settled down to coffee in the kitchen, and Marie had brought out a family photo album. She turned to a picture that must have been taken on the same day that the other one had. In it, Karen wore the same snowsuit, but she was perched on a low wall with a dog, a dalmatian, beside her.

“Was the snowsuit blue?” Karen asked. Marie nodded. Karen pointed to the photo. “Your dog?” she asked. “I don’t remember it.”

“No, my sister’s. Spotty. He died long ago.” She turned another page of the album. She put her arm around Karen’s. She was a very physical person. She kept patting and touching Karen. And Karen liked it.

Karen wouldn’t have minded if Marie began stroking her like a cat.

She looked down at the album. There was another shot of Karen, this time being held by a tall man in a dark overcoat and fedora.

“Alfredo,” Marie said. “He died too.”

“I know. The detective told me.” Karen took Marie’s hand. She didn’t want to ask any of the deeper questions. Was Alfredo her father? Why had they put her up for adoption? Had Marie felt guilt or regret since then?

Had she tried to find Karen? Those were too hard, and Karen felt she was already being given enough for right now. She looked again at the photo of the man holding her.

“Do you remember him?” Marie asked.

“No,” Karen told her honestly. She stared at the photo. For a moment, she thought she could feel the scratchy texture of his coat against her chin. And a smell. A strong smell. “Did he smoke cigars?” she asked.

“Yes!” Marie said. Her eyes filled. “How did you know? You do remember.”

“Just the edge of a memory,” Karen said, but she was as thrilled as Marie.

There were some other photos on the page. Marie pointed out her sister, her mother, and another shot of the dalmatian being led on a leash by her brother-in-law. Then she turned the photo album page and there was the same picture that Karen carried in her schlep bag, the photo of her in the crib with the frog doll.

It wasn’t that Karen had any doubt before, but seeing the same photo, the exact same shot that she had looked at, secretly, for so longţsince she was a little girl back in Brooklynţdid something to her. She burst into tears and found that she couldn’t stop crying. Marie stood up and put her arms around Karen. “There, there,” she said. “Good girl.

It’s all right.”

Belle had never allowed tears. She’d said they were childish, even when Karen was still a child. But Marie seemed perfectly comfortable with Karen’s weeping.

Karen struggled to speak. “My frog,” she said.

“What?” Marie asked.

“My frog,” Karen wept.

Marie patted her again and left the room. Well, what could Karen expect? She must have embarrassed the woman. Still, Karen kept sobbing, sitting there at the kitchen table in this modest little house in the middle of a town she didn’t remember. She tried to calm herself. Maybe she was scaring her mother. But she couldn’t stop.

All she could do was get up and tear a paper towel from the roll beside the kitchen sink.

Then she heard a noise behind her and turned to see Marie in the doorway, tears running down her own face, wordlessly holding out the faded and cracked little green rubber frog.

Marie insisted that Karen stay for dinner. “It won’t be much,” Marie saidţ“just some pasta and maybe some breaded cauliflower and zucchini.

I’m supposed to be on a diet,” she confided, “but I cheat,” she confessed.

Marie and Alfredo had had no other children. Marie told Karen all about her eight nieces and six nephews. Karen told Marie about her career, about her life in New York, but she didn’t, couldn’t, mention her marriage or Belle and Arnold. Still, it seemed as if Marie was perfectly content. She didn’t seem to be the type of person who would pry. She wasn’t the kind of woman who questioned or pressed. In fact, she seemed pleasantly, calmly contented. And the feeling was infectious. Karen sat in the little kitchen while Marie bustled about from the stove to the refrigerator and back. The kitchen took on the smell of good olive oil and roasted peppers. And Karen seemed to drink in the contentment, to feel it coat her and then be absorbed, as dry skin would absorb oil. It felt good, and gave her, for the moment, absolution. Jeffrey and June, the XKInc problems, Lisa and the rest of it, receded. Karen didn’t worry, didn’t even think about all of the problems waiting for her back in New York. She just sat in the little kitchen in the little house in Chicago Heights and felt fine.

They ate, and the meal couldn’t have been more different from anything Belle had ever served Karen. Marieţmy mother, Karen thoughtţhad done more than throw together some pasta. Quickly and effortlessly she had roasted peppers, diced zucchini, and prepared a delicious cauliflower side dish. There was fresh Italian bread and good olive oil to soak it in. The dishes were only Melmac, and the glasses weren’t crystal, but the food was delicious and plentiful. Karen looked around her, thinking, “This is my birth right. This feeling of plenty, of abundance, is the way I could have grown up.” How could things have gone so wrong? How could it have happened that Marie gave up her daughter and Karen was cheated out of all of this?

Karen looked around at the little kitchen and across the table at Marie’s round face, her unfashionable clothes, the photos of nieces and nephews and other family stuck up on the refrigerator, and in little collections on the wall. Karen stared at them all, drinking in the pictures of her family. It was funny to her that they all looked like working-class Italians. It didn’t seem as if she shared any of their features. She was taller, and her hair was light brown, not black, and she was bigger boned than the women. But they were her family. She had cousins and aunts and uncles that she had never met. That she could meet now. But still, she felt as if she had missed so much.

Of course, if I had grown up here I wouldn’t have gone to Pratt. I wouldn’t have met Jeffrey. I probably wouldn’t be a designer. Maybe I would be working in some factory. It would have been a completely different life. It might have been dull. It might have been hard.

Karen knew it wouldn’t have been perfect, but at that moment, hers was so bad that she longed for this one and she longed for the simplicity of Marie.

God, what was so great about being Karen Kahn? What was so great about Westport, or being in WWD, or having dinner in SoHo?

“I’m just so happy to see you. To know you. To know that you’re all right,” Marie was saying. For a moment, Karen longed to tell her that she wasn’t all right, that her whole life was falling apart around her.

But that wasn’t fair. She knew better than to do that. And she felt that as long as she stayed in this room, in this house, she was all right.

They ate and ate. Then Karen helped Marie clear the table, and Marie told her a little bit about Alfredo’s last illness and how much she missed him, now that he was gone. “It was the cigars,” she said. “Him and his cigars.” She shook her head. “Stubborn,” she said. “Forget about it!” Then Marie reached for the album again, wanting to show more pictures of Alfredo. They turned back to where they had left off.

Marie turned the page and there was the picture of Karen, standing beside the address numbers on the front of the house. Both of them stared at the picture for a long time. “That was the day we found out,” Marie said, reaching out to Karen’s hand and caressing it gently.

“The day you found out what?” Karen asked.

“The day we found out that we couldn’t keep you. It was a terrible day.

I couldn’t stop crying. Forget about it! Alfredo thought I was scaring you and making myself sick, but I couldn’t stop.” Tears filled Marie’s eyes again. This time Karen reached out to Marie to help console her.

It was now or never. The girl who had been given up, left alone, stuck with Belle, had to know the answer to the terrible riddle. “But why did you have to? Why didn’t you keep me?” Karen asked. She tried to keep her voice gentle, free of judgment, but the little girl in the picture deserved an answer.

“The state,” Marie said, wiping her eyes, “the state didn’t give us no choice.”

Karen looked at her blankly. Why would the state separate a mother and child? Had Marie and Alfredo been abusive? Karen couldn’t believe it.

Is that why she couldn’t remember much? What else could be the reason?

It wasn’t financial. They may have been poor, but they still had the house from back then, and that was more than many people had.

Marie blew her nose loudly. “It’s so long ago,” she said. “But it still hurts.” She sighed gustily. “Well, it don’t matter. You were taken care of, and it’s so wonderful that you’ve found me and that I get to see you now.”

“It’s so wonderful that I get to meet my real mother,” Karen said.

The older woman paused. “What do you mean?” Marie asked.

“My adoptive family was great,” Karen assured her, though she was no longer sure that was remotely true. “But I always felt like there was something missing. I just felt that I needed to meet my real mother.”

Marie looked at her, her eyes wide. “Karen, we had you for almost four years, from the time you were an infant. I thought for sure the state would give you to us. But then, just before the adoption was finalized, she came back and the state took you away. She had married and she was insisting that you go back to her. It broke our hearts, but it was only right. After all, you didn’t really belong to us.”

Karen stared at Marie. She couldn’t take it in. “What?” was all she managed to ask.

“Karen, I love you. I always loved you. But I was only your foster mom.

You were raised by your real mother.”

“Lisa, I have to see you.”

When Lisa heard Jeffrey’s voice at the other end of the line, she nearly dropped the phone. She didn’t need this now, not after this trouble with the deal falling through, bills coming in, and Leonard ready to kill her. It had, of course, upset her that Jeffrey hadn’t even tried to get in touch with her after Karen had caught them, but then came the stink and her recovery. Since then, with the terrible news that the deal was off, and with Leonard’s suspicions, Lisa felt that not hearing from Jeffrey had actually been a blessing in disguise.

She needed this phone call like she needed another vaginal infection.

“Come on, Jeffrey. I can’t see you.” It gave her a certain satisfaction to be able to say those words. She blamed Jeffrey for all this. He had gotten her excited about that stupid worthless stock. He had wined her and dinedţwell, lunchedţher and started all this trouble.

Lisa wasn’t even remotely a romantic, but she did have enough ego to take pleasure in the opportunity that she’d have to reject him. It was too bad there was no one to witness it or to tell about it. For a moment, she had a flash, a stab almost, of missing Karen because Karen was the one that Lisa could tell her triumphs to. But all that, obviously, was over. To her own surprise, her eyes filled with tears.