Riggs Park (6 page)

Marilyn ignored me. “Imagine having four daughters and only one bathroom,” she said.

“Everyone was short of bathrooms,” I snipped, annoyed at her dodging my question. “We didn’t think about it. Anyway, I think the Weinbergs had a second bath down in one of the basements.” But when I tried to remember where Penny had showered, where she’d put on her makeup, I drew a blank.

I drove back up the hill, made a left onto Third Street and then another onto Oglethorpe, the next block. I’d do a quick tour and get us out of there. “Remember that snowstorm when Penny bashed her head over here?” Marilyn asked. “How Helen Weinberg didn’t even notice?” Whatever this was leading up to, I decided to let Marilyn get to it in her own time. Of course I remembered Penny’s accident. It was one of two youthful snow mishaps we weren’t likely to forget. We’d been sledding on Oglethorpe Street, feeling daring because it was even steeper than Oneida. Unable to slow down, Penny had plowed her sled into the tire of a parked car and given herself a good concussion. “Don’t tell my mother,” she made us promise as we helped her up. We didn’t think we’d need to. Penny’s face had already turned the color of Elmer’s glue. We walked her home, me supporting her and Marilyn carrying her sled. She made it as far as the living-room sofa and slumped down, still in her outdoor clothes. A minute later, Helen Weinberg came in from the kitchen, clad in old slacks and rubber gloves, and said, “I thought I told you to stay out until supper. I’m waxing the floors.” She looked with distaste from one of us to another. “Why are you in the living room still wearing your boots?”

Chastened, we escorted Penny to Marilyn’s and put her to bed for the afternoon. We didn’t know concussion victims aren’t supposed to sleep, but somehow she survived her nap and by supper time felt steady enough to go home. She wasn’t well—not really—for a week. Her sister, Diane, took care of her. Helen Weinberg had never known.

“That’s the thing of it, isn’t it?” Marilyn asked. “The whole—motherhood thing.”

I’d lost her. Puzzled, I opened my mouth to ask what she meant. Then, in the middle of the block, I caught sight of the Wishners’ old house, hunkering onto its lot with even more of a hangdog air than the houses on Oneida Street. For some reason, my first thought was of Pauline Wishner, the kind of housekeeper my mother used to call a
balabusta,
and who would have been horrified at the sorry state of her old home. But it wasn’t Pauline I’d ever cared about, not really. It was always her son. “Wish,” I whispered, and realized I hadn’t uttered that hopeful-sounding nickname for years.

Wish, who would change everything.

For a moment I could hardly breathe, hardly see.

“The name still gets to you, doesn’t it?” Marilyn asked, alert.

“I think what gets to me is this neighborhood looking so ratty.” Light-headed, I drew a breath, concentrated on steering, headed for the other side of Riggs Road, where the memories were less charged but the neighborhood was no less shabby. Lasalle Elementary School still stood at the edge of the old playground, always a pastel-green monstrosity but now considerably worsened by age. Adjacent to the school grounds, on Madison Street, a wrecked car sat in the middle of a front yard. At the curb, another car was booted. The houses and yards were tumbledown; a surly-looking boy leaned on a mailbox and regarded us with such hostility that all the bones in his face looked frozen.

I stepped on the gas, turned back onto Riggs Road, drove quickly past the building that used to be the neighborhood shul, Shaare Tefila. I wanted to get this visit over with.

“I have to eat something,” Marilyn said suddenly. “My head hurts and my stomach hurts and if I don’t get this off my chest about Penny I’m going to explode.”

“It’s about time,” I told her.

She pointed toward a combined Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell coming up on our right. Her expression stayed humorless. “Stop there,” she said.

I
t was hardly the restaurant I would have chosen, a fast-food emporium sitting where our favorite miniature golf course had once been and just across Third Street from the shopping center where we’d spent half our adolescence trying to attract significant boys. Not a single other white person was in sight. I said to Marilyn, “I saw a bunch of places just across the District Line”—a lie. “It’ll take exactly two minutes to get there.” She said, “No. Stop.”

Both the customers and the help kept their eyes on us as we got our food. I picked a booth by a window and slammed down my tray. “All right, tell me about Penny.”

Marilyn unwrapped her straw and inched it into her Diet Coke. She plucked a veggie fajita from its waxed paper wrapper and began splitting open packets of taco sauce. “Well, Steve said something weird on the phone the other day. Not that he doesn’t always say something weird—”

“Still jealous of your brother’s wealth and fame, I see.”

“Yes. All that unresolved sibling rivalry.” The strength of Marilyn’s relationship with her brother was that there had been no rivalry. She was always the boss. “It was the day I called to tell him about the cancer coming back. We probably talked for an hour. You know, the old, ‘whole life flashing before your eyes’ routine. Not something we do a lot.” Although Steve the superstar now lived in a magnificent house in Pacific Palisades outside Los Angeles, he still spent several months a year on the road singing and was exhaustingly in demand the rest of the time.

“He said—” Marilyn unfolded the fajita and doused it with a packet of sauce. “Remember the time Penny went to see him at college? That last time she saw him?”

“Marilyn, the whole country remembers.” It was the subject of the song “Bus Ride” that had made Steve famous. Penny had taken a bus from Maryland to West Virginia where Steve had gone to school. They’d spent the weekend together, and then Penny had travelled back to Washington and dropped out of sight.

“Well, we went over the whole business again, about what happened to Penny after that. Between the last time he saw her at school and before she went off the deep end. Steve said she definitely had a baby.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I heard the shrillness in my tone. We’d been analyzing this subject for thirty-odd years. We’d batted it around ad nauseam, and a baby was the one possibility we’d ruled out years ago, conclusively and finally. “Penny was careful about birth control. Obsessive about it. Determined not to bring more children into the world. If there was one thing she was responsible about, that was it. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. She wouldn’t have let herself get pregnant.”

Marilyn leaned across her food conspiratorially. “All I can say is, Steve says he knows it for a fact.”

“For a
fact?
How? I thought he never talked to Penny again.”

“He didn’t.” Marilyn took a long sip of Diet Coke. Fifty years ago it would have been vanilla Coke from the fountain across the street in People’s Drug Store, and she would have been drinking just as slowly. I felt as if I’d fallen through a time warp.

“Barbara, listen to me.” Marilyn’s voice was crisp. “Remember how Steve always said he kept trying to call Penny all the next summer? While he was on that trip with his band? And how nobody would tell him where she was?”

“Sure,” I said. “Her sisters clammed up because either—” I held up a finger “—one, they didn’t know, or two, she was in a mental institution and they were embarrassed.”

“Barbara, don’t.”

“
Don’t?
Then if Penny was pregnant and she didn’t tell Steve, tell me who did.”

“I’m getting to that.”

“Well, I think it’s bullshit,” I said. “She always told Steve everything.”

“She probably worried the baby was the other guy’s. The one from the ‘Bus Ride’ song,” Marilyn reminded me.

“Not even a possibility. If she actually got pregnant that weekend—which I don’t believe—the father could have been either one of them. And no matter who the father was, she still would have told Steve. Penny knew he loved her. She knew he’d forgive her.”

Marilyn poured another packet of sauce on the fajita. She didn’t look up.

“Or she could have done something else,” I continued. “In the unlikely event—the
very
unlikely event—she was pregnant and not sure whose it was, she could have had an abortion and decided not to talk about it. So she stayed out of touch.”

Marilyn shook her head. “An abortion wouldn’t have been like Penny.”

I had to agree. Horrified as Penny was at the thought of a pregnancy, it was even more impossible to imagine her destroying a life. And “destroying” was exactly how Penny would have seen it—even though the trauma of having an abortion might almost explain what happened to her later. The hideous, almost unthinkable events that, even now, I quickly censored from my thoughts.

“So who told Steve about this theoretical baby?” I asked. “One of her sisters? Who else would know?”

“Essie Berman.”

“Essie! When?”

“After,” Marilyn said. “About a year after.”

“Oh, good lord.” I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me. When I could breathe again I said, “Then why didn’t Steve ever tell
us?
”

“Never underestimate the power of guilt.” Marilyn doused the fajita with one more packet of taco sauce, rendering it completely inedible. “He’s always hated ‘Bus Ride’ being his first big hit. He’s always felt rotten about benefiting from Penny’s problems. You know how he is.” Marilyn took a deep breath. “He always felt responsible for her. I think he always loved her, but—”

“Was also glad to be rid of her,” I finished. There’d been times when we’d all been glad to be rid of Penny.

Marilyn nodded. “So it was easy for Steve to put her out of his mind. Just like it’s easy for us. But then when Essie told him Penny had a child—”

“
Why
did Essie tell him? That’s what I want to know.”

“Because he bugged her for information for a whole year. You know what a pest he could be. So finally Essie said she’d tell him what she knew if he promised never to ask another question. Never to take it further. To do nothing.”

“And he promised? Even though she might have been telling him about his own child?”

“Or somebody else’s child,” Marilyn said. “Anyway, I think he was pretty surprised to hear there was a child.”

“What else did Essie tell him?”

“Nothing. Not even if it was a boy or a girl.”

“So he’s known all these years. While we were still trying to figure it out.”

Marilyn shrugged. “Essie told him not to. But now—I think he’s curious. I think that’s why he mentioned it.”

“Either that or he made it up to take your mind off your troubles.” All his life, Steve had been nothing if not creative.

“He wouldn’t insult me like that.” Refusing to look at me, she stared out the window to the shopping center across the street, where the old Giant had become Tiger Foods and the People’s Drug Store was a CVS Pharmacy, and the parking lot was badly in need of resurfacing. Then she inhaled deeply, set her elbows on the table, and dropped her head into her palms, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. When she looked up, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. “What if the baby
was
Steve’s?” she asked.

“What if it was?”

“Don’t you think he’d want to know?”

“Absolutely not.”

She cocked her head in surprise.

“What would Kimberly think?” I asked. “What about the boys? It would be awful.” Steve had married late, in his forties, after he had been famous long enough to get used to his celebrity and grown confident enough to confess on national TV what he thought was a momentous personal secret. His marriage had always been rock solid. After his wife had a couple of miscarriages, they had adopted four learning-disabled sons, all now well-adjusted young men.

Scratching her eyelid with a knuckle, Marilyn smeared mascara across her cheek. “I thought even with all those kids he might still be hoping he had one that was his own flesh and blood.”

“Listen. Even assuming there’s this long-lost child, it would be an adult, older than Mike and Robin, living some kind of life we don’t have a clue about. What happens when all of a sudden it finds out it has a famous father? You’d only be opening Pandora’s box.”

“We wouldn’t have to tell the
child.
”

“Marilyn, it wouldn’t be a child. That’s just my point.”

“The offspring, then. And you could help. You’re the one who does research for a living.” She fixed me with a mournful, lambent gaze.

“Oh, no. You’re not guilt-tripping me into this. I do term papers. The influence of Sir Thomas Mallory on the modern novel. Nothing real. If Steve wanted to, he could hire a hundred researchers more qualified than I am. The fact that he hasn’t ought to tell you something.”

Dramatically, Marilyn said nothing.

“Besides,” I said. “If Penny really had a baby, why didn’t she come out of hiding after it was born and she made her arrangements for it? Why wait another six months to surface again? What was she doing, trying to regain her girlish figure?” Penny had always been slim.

“That’s really lame,” Marilyn said.

It was, and the fact of that made me angry. I pushed my tray away from me so hard it clunked into hers. “I hate Mexican food,” I yelled. “I don’t know why I let you bring me here.”

A woman dressed like a desert nomad shot us a withering glance from the next booth. Marilyn raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, “Oh, you’ve really done it now, Barbara,” and stood up. “You could have had fried chicken,” she told me. She gathered the remains of our uneaten lunch and carried them to the trash.

I slid out of the booth, followed her, handed her her purse. In our rush toward the glass door to the parking lot, we nearly collided with two huge teenagers, each looking like a linebacker for his football team. Marilyn gave them a brilliant smile. One of them held the door for us. Outside, Marilyn dropped the smile. “I bet she’s still alive,” she said.

“Who?”

“Essie Berman.”

“Essie! That’s crazy. She was old even when we were kids. She’s probably been dead for years.”

“Not necessarily. Kids think everyone is old. She came to my mother’s funeral.”

“That was ten years ago!” Marilyn’s mother had died unexpectedly, and I had missed the funeral because I was on vacation and Marilyn hadn’t wanted to interrupt my trip to tell me. I snatched my keys from my purse and unlocked the car.

“At the funeral Essie looked like she’d still be around in another ten years,” Marilyn said. “Maybe another twenty.”

“She’d be at least in her nineties. Probably senile.”

“She never struck me as the type who’d get senile. Even in her nineties.” We’d always thought Essie older than our parents because of her salt-and-pepper hair—but as Marilyn said, maybe not. It doesn’t occur to a six-year-old that some people simply gray early.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not interested.”

Unfazed, Marilyn got into the car. “I even tried finding her in the phone book,” she persisted.

An unbidden bubble of laughter gurgled up through my irritation. “Had a slow week, did you? Didn’t have enough to do between selecting medical treatments and scheduling cosmetic surgery? How many Esther Bermans are there in the phone book, anyway?”

“There was no listing,” Marilyn huffed. “I tried the retirement places and the nursing homes, too. But I think she’s still around.”

“Don’t be delusional. Did you try Maryland or just D.C.?”

“I only look dumb.”

During our years in Riggs Park, Essie’s single status had been an oddity, and her family, if she had any, wasn’t in Washington. If Essie were still alive, no telling where she might be, or with whom. It was true Penny might have confided to her even a dark secret like a pregnancy—though it was hard for me to believe in a pregnancy even if Steve had said so. Despite all the confusion in Penny’s life, on this one issue she’d been firm, even before she was old enough to worry about it. She had not been wanted. She would not inflict that pain on anyone else. End of story. Steve’s account was odd enough, but Marilyn setting out on a wild-goose chase for Essie was odder. As children, Penny and I had looked to Marilyn as the gold standard of sanity. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I’d heard the story of how the body could heal itself at the expense of the mind, that that could ever change.

“I know what you’re thinking, Marilyn,” I bellowed as I pulled out of the parking lot, counting on volume to shake her back to her senses. “You think you’ll be in there having your surgery tomorrow and out of guilt and sympathy good old Barbara will be out chasing down Steve’s nonexistent long-lost child. Let me tell you right now, that’s not going to happen. Bernie and I will both be sitting in the waiting room with our blood pressure off the charts while we twiddle our thumbs. If you want to spare us that, learn to live with your wrinkles.”

“Bernie won’t be sitting in the waiting room,” Marilyn said. “He never sits in the waiting room. I don’t want you to, either.”

“That’s ridiculous.” We thudded over a huge pothole that jolted the whole car. “What does Bernie think of this whole ‘baby’ thing?” I demanded.

“I haven’t told him.”

“Because you know he’d think it’s as crazy as I do.”

“Steve wouldn’t lie to me, Barbara.” A mask of exhaustion dropped over her face, and we drove past the District Line in silence.

When her voice came again, it was just a thread. “You remember my baby that died?”

“Of course. Did you think I’d forget?” Marilyn’s second child, a girl, arrived two years after Mike. She was so blue that she never left the delivery room before doctors diagnosed the hole in her heart, something that even today might not have been a routine repair. In the confused moments before they rushed her to Children’s Hospital for surgery, Marilyn chose not to see the baby. “If she’s all right, then I’ll have plenty of time to get to know her,” she’d said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “Better to not get attached yet—just in case.” She’d named the baby Carolyn.