Promise Me A Rainbow (2 page)

“Yes, all right,” Catherine said.

“Oh, good. Thank you, my dear. He’s such a nice man when you get to know him. He’s a widower. He did all the glass lampshades here in the shop. That’s where I met him—in a stained glass workshop. He was wonderful at it—such patience for a man his age. I was terrible. I broke everything I touched. He called me Crash. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in one of the lamps?”

“Not for some time,” Catherine answered, and the woman laughed.

“But you must come in again, anyway—just to browse. I’m close to the bus stop, so I get a lot of browsers. Now, if you’d just sign your name here—and put your address and telephone number along the bottom.”

Catherine wrote quickly. She’d indulged her whim; now she was anxious to get away. She watched while the woman wrapped the gnomes in newspaper and placed them in a purple box—very subtle advertising on her part, Catherine thought.

She ran her fingers restlessly along the smooth wooden edge of the display case while she waited, and she suddenly remembered a place from her childhood. A “smart” children’s shop with display cases like these. A small family business that sold blue velvet dresses and black patent-leather shoes and white rabbit-fur coats. A place where her mother had never been able to buy her anything but where they had always gone inside to look.

Catherine felt a twinge of guilt. By her mother’s example, she had been well taught to postpone her own personal gratification, and subsequently she had never gotten blue velvet, patent leather, or white fur. But then, her mother never had had to deal with the temptation created by a plastic charge card.

She had to run to catch her bus, and it was still raining. She sat by the window near the back, holding the conspicuous purple box and staring out wet glass at the familiar streets. She had always liked the downtown section of Wilmington. It was old but rapidly becoming refurbished, a fact that she’d somehow missed until just recently. It was as if she had been seriously ill, too ill to note the changes in her environment, and yet she’d supposedly participated in the business of everyday living. She’d functioned. She’d gone to work, done her job, come home again. But her thoughts had all been turned inward.

She was barren. How appropriate the word was.
Barren
. It called to mind everything she felt about her own body, that it was dried up, hostile, useless. She was thirty-two years old and no longer married to the man she had loved. It would have been easier if she hadn’t believed that he’d once loved her in return, perhaps still did. But he wanted children—not adopted children and not borrowed children.
His
children. He had loved her, and he had left her in spite of it.

At first she had thought she would die from the overwhelming sense of betrayal. Her body had betrayed her and, subsequently, her husband. For a time she deliberately let herself suffer for something for which she was not to blame. According to the infertility specialist, neither of them had been at fault; it was just one of those things. There was no physical or hormonal defect in either of them, and she believed that Jonathan had tried very hard to accept that fact—intellectually. But what he had communicated to her on an emotional level was something else again. She had sensed, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn’t merely that he felt she’d failed him, but more that he felt she had somehow done it deliberately, as if her ability to conceive was something she’d withheld from him for reasons of her own. They’d been told to get on with their lives, to relax, to stop thinking about it. But Jonathan couldn’t accept any alternative way for her to experience rearing a child. What he’d wanted was for her to be realistic.

She had tried to understand, did understand, as well as a woman who needed to nurture something could. For Jonathan the child had to be his own. She had kept thinking about Charlotte Duffy, a woman she’d met in the gynecologist’s office. They had been admitted to the hospital at the same time—Charlotte for what their mothers would have euphemistically described as “female trouble,” and she for another round of infertility testing. Charlotte had three children of her own, and she and her husband had just adopted a child from some impoverished Central American country. Charlotte had shown her picture after picture of her newest, a dark-skinned little girl and, later, as they lay in the restless, artificial darkness of their hospital room waiting for some semblance of sleep, Charlotte had confessed what she believed to be a shameful, yet wonderful sin. She, Charlotte Duffy, loved her adopted child best.

Jonathan had listened politely to the story of Charlotte and her adoption, but Catherine believed that he had seen her willingness to adopt a child like Charlotte’s as some sort of mental aberration, brought on by the desperation of her infertility.

In the end he had been realistic enough for the both of them. Time was running out. He had wanted his own child, and he hadn’t waited to see if his marriage to her would bring that about. He had already wasted three years and, regardless of Charlotte Duffy’s confusion or the success stories they’d heard about other childless couples who’d adopted, then had children of their own, he’d wanted out.

Their uncoupling had been agony for them both, her incredulity compounding his guilt. He had been her best friend, and it had taken her a long time to believe that he had done to her what she never would have done to him, no matter how badly she’d wanted a child. He had left the marriage.

She still saw him from time to time—at his instigation and out of his sense of responsibility toward her. They had been friends first, then lovers, then marriage partners, and she thought he missed her. She thought, too, that he wanted—needed—to salvage some working part of their relationship, something among the ashes of what once was a marriage, so he could say, “See? I haven’t destroyed everything.”

But he had destroyed everything. She had failed at the most basic validation of her womanhood, and his abandonment had made the failure a thousand times worse. But abandoned or not, passive in her failure or not, she did not want to live on the fringes of his life now. She was clearly a survivor, though she took no credit for it and she hadn’t pulled herself up by her own bootstraps. Her survival was simply something that
was
, like her inability to conceive.

She took it as a sign of her recovery when, eighteen months after the divorce, she suddenly noticed that some of the 1950s aluminum facades had been taken off the downtown storefronts to reveal the old two-over-two windows, and that the layers of paint and neglect had been sandblasted down to the original brick. More and more businesses were moving into the old-fashioned stores—small, non-descript places like The Purple Box. Concrete sections of the sidewalks were torn up and replaced with brick, and there were benches and flowers and newly planted trees. Through traffic was kept to a minimum, and the old downtown had suddenly become a place for pedestrians. She began to enjoy that, the freedom to crisscross the street from store to store, and she began to realize that she wanted to be in the company of people again. Not necessarily to talk to them, though she did sometimes indulge in conversations with strangers, but just to watch and to wonder about them. She had lost her insatiable curiosity about the people and the things around her for a time, but somehow she suddenly had rediscovered it. She had always known that about herself—that she was innately curious—and perhaps that had been the key to her survival. Whatever the cause, every day was getting better.

The rain had lessened by the time she reached her stop, ten blocks away. She lived alone in a yellow-brick, three story apartment house called the Mayfair, which had a green terracotta roof. The bricks were dingy with soot and time, and there was no central air-conditioning, but it had two huge oak trees in its miniscule yard, and the rent was relatively cheap. The front and side entrances were all French doors, three panes of beveled glass across and five down, so that security was probably nonexistent. Most all of the tenants were longtime residents who considered the building “theirs,” a good thing if one wanted one’s comings and goings to be under constant surveillance, not such a good thing if one put a high price on privacy. Thus far she hadn’t minded their scrutiny. She had no illicit lovers she needed to hide; she had no lovers at all.

She entered, expecting Mrs. Donovan to give her a report on the mail delivery and the daily comings and goings. Mrs. Donovan had a bird’s eye view of the front door, the mailboxes, and the foot of the stairs. She was the sister of the woman who owned the apartment house, and she had the remarkable luxury of having both a wooden and a screen door to her apartment. The screen was ostensibly because Mrs. Donovan preferred a draft to a window-unit air conditioner. In actuality it was because, in the summer at least, Mrs. Donovan was the unofficial keeper of the Mayfair gates. Sometimes, when the draft was strong, one could smell the cigarette smoke wafting in from Mrs. Donovan’s apartment, not because she was a smoker but because she sometimes lit Lucky Strikes and blew the smoke around her living room to remind herself of her dead husband. Mr. Donovan had been gone for more than thirty years, but for Mrs. Donovan, with the help of a Lucky Strike and a nostalgic mind-set, he had only just left the room.

The wooden door was closed today.

Catherine checked her mail in the quiet downstairs foyer, tossing everything but the bills into a flowered trashcan that was kept close by. The stairs to the upper floors were wooden, layered in coat after coat of brown enamel paint and impossible to climb without making a racket. It occurred to her that unless a burglar confined himself to the ground floor, there was no need for the Mayfair to have any security. She climbed the stairs quickly, appreciating the stamina she’d acquired from living three flights up. When she’d first moved here, she’d had to rest at every landing. If one could believe clichés, she supposed that every cloud did have its silver lining and that her now strong legs and lungs were the direct benefit of having been forced to move to a cheaper place—that and the serenity she had gained from living at treetop level. She liked that about her apartment: that it was in the front and that the windows looked out onto the tops of the oak trees.

“Catherine,” someone said as she climbed the last flight, the sound a bit distorted by the echo off the bare wood of the stairs.

She looked upward; Jonathan sat on the top step. He never wore a raincoat or carried an umbrella, and he’d left a trail of wet footprints and rain droplets on the stairs.

“You’re late,” he said, getting up. “I thought you got home a little after five.”

“I don’t keep a schedule, Jonathan.” She shifted the purple box to her other arm so she could unlock the door, resisting for a moment when he took it from her.

“No, I didn’t mean to imply that you did,” he said carefully. “What’s in the box?”

“None of your business,” she said, because it was the only answer that might keep him from looking.

He smiled, the smile boyish and winsome. She had always liked his smile, and a memory immediately surfaced, one of her lying in his arms on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

She pushed the memory aside. “What do you want, Jonathan?”

“I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m fine.” She opened the door and he followed her inside.

“Are you?” he asked, and she glanced at him, suspecting that he came to see about her so often now because she really was fine and that he was willing to offer her the comfort of his presence now that he knew she was strong enough not to need it.

She took the box out of his hands and set it on the table by the front door before she turned to meet his gaze. “Yes,” she said evenly.

“I’m glad,” he answered, but he looked away. There was no mistaking his relief, his anxiousness to accept what she said as the truth. He gave a soft sigh, as if he were bracing himself for something.

“Catherine . . .”

“Jonathan, what is it?” she said sharply. She had known him long enough to know when he was filled with purpose, and she was still too emotionally battered to play guessing games.

He smiled again. “I’m not keeping you from anything, am I? Are you going out with someone or something?”

She felt her irritation rise, suspecting, too, that Jonathan, regardless of his need for her to be independent, still wanted her to be alone and unattached.

She picked up the box and took it into the living room for no other reason than to have something to do. She knew divorced women who found new men almost immediately, but she was still coping with her internal shortcomings. Intellectually, she believed that she was attractive enough, trim enough, educated enough to be sought after again, but somehow it hadn’t helped.

“Sorry,” Jonathan said as she set the box down on yet another table. “I shouldn’t ask that, should I? So tell me. How’s the new job?”

“How did you know I had a new job?”

“Word travels.”

“Whose word?”

“Mrs. Donovan downstairs.”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “Then suppose
you
tell me. How am I doing? Do I like it or not?”

“She’s not sure. She’s not even sure what it is you do exactly—or if she is, I don’t think she considers it a fit subject for mixed company.”

Catherine smiled. “No, actually I don’t think she does. I believe she finds it a bit . . . inappropriate.”

“Well, now you’ve really piqued my interest. We can still talk, can’t we? You could even give me some coffee. I’d really like to hear, Catherine.”

She almost believed him—even if she had become the formal-sounding stranger, Catherine, the one with whom he couldn’t live any longer but with whom he wanted to talk about her job—even when he was standing here in a jacket much too wet to have left on. Clearly, he wasn’t planning on having this take long.

It was raining again, the wind driving it against the front windows.

“How about it? Some coffee and conversation before I brave the storm?” he said, cajoling her.

She gave a little gesture of acquiescence and walked toward the kitchen. “Well, come on,” she said when he didn’t follow. “This isn’t a restaurant.”

He smiled that smile again, the winsome, charming one, as he followed behind her.

“Do you like this place?” he asked, looking up at the high ceilings in the kitchen. Her apartment was a far cry from the restored Victorian town house they’d shared in a quaint, shady neighborhood of two-car young professionals. Now she didn’t own a car at all, and the Mayfair was like a once beautiful aging woman, whose beauty existed only for those who remembered it.