Lake People (5 page)

The boathouse, that was the answer Malcolm had given. Originally it had just been a shed built over the water, a place for Otto to store his motorboat and, eventually, Malcolm’s canoe. But a few years back Otto had followed the pattern of so many others in town and had a second level built above the first, which he rented out as an apartment. The baby, Malcolm said, had been in the lower level, in the floating canoe. He said it was a miracle clear as day that she hadn’t been tossed into the whitecapped water. When he said this Sophie went to him, patted his hair, and told him she agreed.

Otto didn’t say a word, not to Signe and not to anyone else. Instead, in his own way, he went a little mad. In response to Signe’s statement he walked out of the house and down to his shop in town, where he made and sold ice cream, as his father and grandfather had. He spent the night there, and many more after that. On the first night he made more ice cream than he had ever made before—one hundred gallons; he simply started with it and could not stop. After that he took a rest on the cement floor and then he began again, making and freezing ice cream and making and freezing more. He would never be able to sell it all, and he was already running out of room to store it. Still he kept on, and on the rare occasions that he did return home, he kept his eyes averted from the baby. It wasn’t difficult to do, because each time he entered the house Sophie or Malcolm would scoot that baby right up the stairs, out of sight.

Aunt Signe washed and pressed the laundry, cleaned the house, cooked the food, and tended to the bills. And, more than once, she said to her niece, “I should expect you intend to claim that child.”

At first, Sophie, like her husband, gave no response. One time she said yes. The final time, though, she kept her eyes fixed out the window, on those turkeys in the yard, as she said to her aunt that they both knew the sort of husband Sophie had chosen. “But Otto is a good man,” she said lightly.

And Otto was good, or at least he firmly meant to be. But he had been raised in a certain way; his mind had formed in a certain way. Things were right or things were wrong and if he could not decide which it was, he figured he’d best do away with it. In town he kept watch in the papers and listened on the streets and in the post office, trying to see if anyone knew about the baby. He heard nothing, and at times he wondered if perhaps it could just continue in this secret way. So he would let his wife have what she wanted. He could just stay away. Because to speak up—no, look at the life he had built, the values he stood for. But to take the baby from her, surely that would break his dear Sophie in half.

The Wickholms’ house sat on the top of the hill, higher than any other in Kettleborough, with a grand view of the lake below. The only thing that obstructed the view was the Randolph house and the clump of pines on the Randolph land. Otto had wanted those trees cut down. He had even offered to pay for the job to be done, but Mrs. Randolph had sent her oldest son up to their house to tell them no. “They’re Mother’s favorites,” the boy had stood on the porch repeating as though it were the only sentence he knew. Now Otto walked past those trees, past that house with its paint peeling and its lawn overgrown and its yard so overrun
with junk that it could be taken for the dump itself, past Mrs. Randolph, who sat glued, as always, to her rocking chair on the porch. He kept his shoulders high, his eyes pointed toward his own tall white home, just ten or so yards above.

“Evening, Otto!” Mrs. Randolph hollered, as she always did.

Otto tipped his head in her direction. Typically that marked the end of the interchange. But now she whistled to him and called out, “Not so fast.” As usual, she had that telephone in her lap, that long, curly cord stretched out from her kitchen. That Mrs. Randolph passed the day away by listening in on neighbors’ phone calls was no secret.

Otto wouldn’t stop for her. Instead he gave a firm salute and continued walking up the hill. He was still within earshot when he heard her say, “I knows about that child. Don’t go thinking I don’t.”

“One more day,” Sophie pleaded when her husband marched into the house, told her that the baby had to go and there would be no discussion about it, and then marched right back out. The door had already closed after him by the time her words came out.

“You know how to be the person I raised,” Signe said.

“Jennifer,” Sophie said in response. “Someone has to call Jennifer.”

With his father out of the house, Malcolm knew he had to do it. He went to his father’s office and took up a pen and wrote Jennifer’s name in that big, bubbly script she had used. He wrote the number, too—he knew it by heart. Everyone in the family did. For though Jennifer was a Hill—which even Malcolm understood to mean that she was of the poorest class of people in Kettleborough—she had become a part of the Wickholm family.
Karl had met her out at summer camp two years ago and the two had been in love ever since. “That girl is smart,” Otto had liked to say, “but not from a good family.” “That’s a hard worker, but not from a good family.” She had been one of the girls who went to summer camp for free, which Malcolm knew because his father had told him as if in answer to his question, which had simply been, “Why is she allowed to sleep at our house?”

But then not four months ago Jennifer had stopped coming over.

Malcolm dialed. Jennifer’s mother answered.

“Karl has died,” Malcolm said quickly. It was that word,
died
. It had been two weeks. That word was too soon. “My brother,” he went on. “This is Karl Wickholm. Malcolm Wickholm I mean. My brother. Jennifer’s boyfriend.” He stopped and took a deep breath, wiped his arm across his sweating brow. “My mother asked me to call,” he finally admitted.

“I’ll be,” the woman said.

What kind of mother would this woman be, to keep a home that wasn’t good? Malcolm had never thought to ask.

“What is your name?” he said now. It felt adult, that question.

“Valerie. Val, people call me.”

“Do you have a husband?”

“Are you interested?” The woman laughed. Her voice was husky. Malcolm imagined an angular glass of whiskey and ice in her hand. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said after a moment. “A joke. My Jennifer’s gone missing, you know that? I was hoping she was over there in your house, but she’s not. I know your Karl’s dead. Mrs. Randolph called us up.”

Malcolm found his mother in his own bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, the baby between her outstretched legs. In her
hands danced ribbons of red and pink, which she’d curled with the edge of scissors. The baby squirmed toward the ribbon and made her wonderful infant noises.

“Jennifer has gone missing. Did you know? Her mother knows Karl is gone. Mrs. Randolph called her up. They’re friends, did you know? She was listening in, Mrs. Randolph, I heard the click of the phone.”

Sophie clapped her hands and gave the baby a wink to tell her it would be all right, which of course it would not. Jennifer gone missing, there was the proof. What lengths would Otto go to, if she ignored his orders and allowed this to go on? She clapped once more and looked about the room. She had always meant to put new wallpaper up in here. Would Karl remember what his room had looked like? No, that is not what she meant. What does a dead person remember. I remember roller-skating on the marvelous cement sidewalk, Sophie thought. There now. If her Karl had lived, that is what she meant. If he had lived would it have been the cold jumps into the lake on the first day of summer? The cookies warm from the oven, his first love?

“We’ve got to do something about this baby,” Sophie scolded her son. “Call Joseph at the fire station. Find out what happens to a baby without a home. Get the Polaroid. Call Joseph and get the Polaroid.”

Malcolm did as he was told. With the camera in his hand he had to wait some time on the line while the men at the fire station bickered. Mrs. Randolph was listening in and it must have been excruciating for her to keep silent, for certainly she knew the answer to the question. Clara and Paul Thorton is what Joseph came back to say. They were the foster parents for Kettleborough.

“Can’t we …,” Malcolm said hopelessly to his mother. He had not begun to piece things together. He simply loved the baby.

“Hush,” she said. She held the baby in her arms and had Malcolm snap a picture. Then she took one with her son holding the child. Finally she took a picture in which Malcolm held the baby forward, so that only her own little body dangled there in the frame.

“Hide these upstairs,” she said. Again he agreed, because he had not seen his mother behave in such a rushed manner before. When he came back she instructed him to put his father’s large coat on and drape the edge of it over the child. “Don’t need Mrs. Randolph seeing us, now do we?” she said.

They walked down the hill and into town. Malcolm kept his nose pressed against the fuzzy head of the child. That smell, he could inhale it for a lifetime. The Thortons lived just across the street from the library, in a little red carriage house with a stone wall to line the front. Sophie and Malcolm took their time walking up the drive. They stood on the granite step and breathed that wood smoke and fallen leaf smell and it was Malcolm who finally raised his arm and knocked.

“We have found a baby,” he said.

Clara said she couldn’t just take a baby like this. “There will have to be an investigation,” she said.

Sophie shuddered then. A small, faint shudder that Malcolm imagined was just the noise of a wild animal, like a bear or a deer, when it has a few breaths to go but knows that after that its lifetime of breath will be used up.

Malcolm straightened his back and handed the baby Clara’s way, then ironed his coat with his hands. “The police have very recently delivered heartbreaking news to our home,” he said in a steady voice. “My mother does not wish to deal with the police. You will understand.”

“Yes,” is all Clara said. Her husband came to the door and Malcolm shook his hand.

“We can’t just take a baby like this,” Paul said to Malcolm.

But they took her anyway. Alice, she would soon be called, and in another couple of weeks news would come that the Thortons had decided to adopt her as their own. Now, on the way up the hill, Malcolm assured his mother that they were good, quiet people and that they would care well for that baby.

Some days Sophie played slow piano songs that contained a glimmer not of hope or of happiness but of something akin to both. These chords rose out of a place like old age, wherein the player could see or smell the tip of a memory, but she could not grasp on to the image enough to say what it was she remembered and anyway if it belonged to her. These songs were Malcolm’s favorites.

Other days Sophie played the songs from just after the war ended. Back then she dressed in shorter skirts than she had ever worn before, and how she danced, and the parties! For an entire summer they would be booked up one Saturday after another. “Bring someone home with you for dinner,” she would tell her husband. Now there was no one, not even Signe, for the two of them had had their first fight. It was over a deed to a small plot of land and a run-down cabin out on the island they had both come from—Signe believed that in the least, the girl ought to have that one day. Sophie didn’t disagree, not entirely, but to Signe she had heard herself say, “We best make a clean break of it.” It was an awful, shameful thing to say, and now she felt sure that it wasn’t what had been in her heart. But Signe had left straightaway, and when she called later that day it was only to say that she had given the deed and all the necessary paperwork to Clara Thorton, who had been instructed to see that it was passed on to the girl when she came of age. Now nearly a week had passed and Signe had not reappeared.

But the hymns, these would keep Sophie going. She thought she knew at least two hundred of them. Hear a song one time, and she could play it straight through. It was a gift and in the days after the baby Sophie sat at her piano and wondered what it might mean to leave this life for another. A musician in the city, a real, independent woman—she could become that; she believed she could. But instead she stayed at home and felt like the most horrible mother ever to be put upon this earth and she kept her suffering to herself, for that is the way it was done. Each time the mailman came to the front step and dropped a letter addressed to Malcolm from Jennifer in Oregon through the slot, Sophie would watch it as though it could at any moment move of its own volition. She would watch the dust in the air gleam in the sunlight and she would lift one of her aunt Signe’s glass paperweights from the mantel and hold it to the sun, trying, with no success, to make the beams of light refract, and she would know that her son was down the hill visiting the baby at Clara and Paul’s, and she would finally, when the letter did not move, stand up and say, “Make something of this blessed life,” and she would take that letter and hide it in the pile at the back of her top dresser drawer, where those pictures were, too, and she would return to the piano.

Because what was her son to do with the words from Jennifer? What weight might those words pass on to him? There were two letters now and Sophie had not opened either of them, but she had held them to the light in the window, to no avail.