The Story of Beautiful Girl (11 page)

She moved to the foot of the bed and knelt beside the bassinet. Earl was gone—but the baby was already familiar. Martha cupped the little head and stroked the thin coating of hair. The baby’s face seemed more intricate each time Martha looked, much as books revealed new depths on each rereading. Now, in morning light muted by shades, the baby’s cheeks seemed more active, the lips in constant motion. Martha moved in closer. The tiny body invited infinite rereadings as well; for the first time, Martha noticed the baby place her fist to her lips, then suck as if her fist were a bottle. Martha recalled Eva saying the baby would need to feed every few hours; and slowly it occurred to her that she was not seeing overlooked eloquence in an oft-studied novel, but a simple request for a bottle. How about that. Babies asked to eat even in their sleep.

Laughing at her own lofty thoughts, Martha opened the cooler Eva had packed with bottles and that Martha had, after check-in, filled with ice, leaving out one bottle after each feeding so it would be warm enough by the baby’s next meal. She retrieved a full bottle from the basin counter, worked her arms under the baby, and sat on the bed.

While she slid the nipple between the pink lips and the baby sucked, Martha considered how, for all the depths she kept finding in this face, there was already much she could recite verbatim. The skin was pale; the face heart-shaped; the eyes set close together. The nose was turned up and slightly large, with a pronounced indentation beneath the nostrils. The lips rose like the crest of a wave; the chin was tiny as the tip of a triangle; the whorls in the ears were sinuous as streams. Martha had to talk herself through each step—hanging the diaper, setting the used diaper in the bin Eva had provided, putting on another. She was pleased she’d needed no instructions in contemplating a baby’s face.

Holding the child on her shoulder, patting so she would fall back asleep, Martha opened the shades. Rays of light threaded between hemlocks and white pines, and she could make out a sliver of porcelain blue sky. She stood looking, telling herself she needed to decide what to do with the baby. The options seemed as foggy as her recollection of the registration desk. How long could she stay in this room? Should she give the baby to someone better suited to being a mother? As the child breathed back to sleep, Martha wrestled with the unanswerable. Then she returned her to the bassinet and, with relief, turned her attention to this face yet again. It was such a pleasure to gaze upon, and as she studied the fine details, she remembered a belief she’d held as a teacher. There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who
savored the same book repeatedly. Some teachers saw the former readers as intrepid, the latter tentative, while Martha had held the view that old comforts, by encouraging patience, prompted discoveries. Now, though, Martha understood those rereaders differently. Aware that she was about to behave uncharacteristically by climbing back under the quilt in midmorning, she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the
rereader—
because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.

A knock, not the baby, woke Martha the next morning.

She drew herself up. The knock paused. She looked at the bassinet, which was bathed in dawn light. The baby was still sleeping.
What an easy child,
Martha thought, then laughed at herself for presuming she knew what she was talking about. The knock started up again.

Through the door came a man’s voice: “Mrs. Zimmer?”

“I’ll be right there,” she whispered.

She put on her slippers and crossed the room, then realized she wore the same nightie she’d worn the day before and was hardly ready for visitors. Embarrassed, she pulled the door ajar and allowed only her head to be seen.

Henry stood in the corridor. She still thought of him as her student, but he was not ten anymore. Henry was a man, barrel-chested and dark-haired. Even after the adventures she’d read about in his letters and heard firsthand last Christmas, when he and his wife told her they were purchasing a fixer-upper of a resort in New York State, Henry still resembled the energetic student he’d been. He stood before Martha, theatrically bearing a tray on his palm, grinning.

“Room service,” Henry announced in a spirited tone. “Compliments of the house.”

Martha smiled, though she made no move to open the door farther. She dearly wanted to; the scent of bacon, eggs, and toast, rising from a silver lid covering a plate, reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since she’d pocketed the sourballs when she’d checked in. She was, however, not accustomed to being seen in nightwear. “How very nice of you, Henry. But it’s not necessary.”

“Au contraire,” Henry said. “Your favorite teacher shows up in the middle of the night, your kids get all enthused about plying her for info about Papa as a kid, she doesn’t show up for meals, she’s got her grandniece’s kid with her, she doesn’t crack the door for a day and a half—tell me you wouldn’t worry she’s starving to death.”

How could Martha have crossed anyone’s mind when she hadn’t crossed her own? “You’re right. I suppose I lost track of time.”

“I kept saying to Graciela, Let’s see how she’s doing, bring her a meal, blah, blah, Graciela kept saying let you be, I kept saying we gotta do something—”

“I’m sorry to have caused any concern at all.”

“Concern? This is the tastiest dish on the breakfast menu. Of course, you don’t have to stay all cooped up, you know. My kids are right down the hall”—he indicated with his head, and Martha heard giggling—“and what they wouldn’t give to sit next to you in the dining room.”

“I’m hardly dressed for that.”

“Come as you are. You could get anything off the menu, and Gracie would put your order in before all the others. Not that there’s competition. We’ve still got a ways to go to build up our clientele.” He made an endearing shrug. “We’ve got all kinds of attractions. My kids. The paint job I’m doing in the game room. My kids. The washing machine by the pool. I happen to be a liberated husband, and I know diapers pile up fast.”

As if it wasn’t embarrassing enough to be caught in her nightie,
here she hadn’t even considered laundering diapers. Certain the room must smell, she could say nothing.

“Graciela asked me to tell you she’d be just as happy helping you out as doing her work around here. Painting’s not really her bag, you could say. So if you just want to stay put, give me those diapers, she’ll take care of them, and we’ll leave you alone. We know you have to get to your sister’s soon, but until you need to leave, we could practice our hospitality.”

Martha was wordless again, though for a different reason. She’d almost missed the earlier reference to “grandniece,” but now she remembered. Two nights ago, when she’d pulled up to the sprawling hotel, she’d been so tired, so eager to settle the baby in, that when Graciela, her brown, waist-length hair askew, her dark eyes bleary, had answered the bell Martha tapped in the lobby, she’d made up a story on the spot, bristling at how readily a person could lie. She’d said her grandniece was having the kinds of problems young people were having these days—allowing vagueness to suggest discretion—and while her grandniece was receiving care, she was transporting the baby to her sister. Henry and Graciela didn’t know that Martha had no sister. They knew only that her husband had died and she herself had no children. From Graciela’s reaction—interest in the baby, assistance in them reaching room 119, no interrogations—Martha knew her dishonesty had sufficed.

“I appreciate the help with diapers. As for eating, what you have here will do just fine.”

“Whatever you say, Mrs. Zimmer.”

“I’ll set the soiled diapers out later. Would you mind leaving the tray at the door?”

“We’ve come prepared to provide luxury dining in your room.” He gestured with his foot, and a young boy missing two front teeth pushed a cloth-covered cart next to his father.

Martha felt her face fall into the familiar teacher’s smile, the one that shaped her cheeks every September, when new students settled at their desks and turned their eyes forward. It was an easy smile that felt like the opening of a door and inspired those on the other side to walk in.

“And who’s this?” Martha said.

“Ricardo,” the boy said, half-shy, half-assertive.

“Aren’t you helpful, Ricardo,” she said.

He giggled. “I’m good with the little paintbrush, too.”

“I’m good with the roller!” a girl called from someplace just out of sight in the corridor.

“Wait your turn, Rose,” Henry said, his voice indulgent.

“I’d like to give you more to do, Ricardo,” Martha said, “but it would be just fine if you left the cart and the tray out here. I’ll bring them in myself.”

“Are you coming to dinner later?” Ricardo asked.

Henry said, “She doesn’t know yet, Ricky.”

He looked as if he wanted to say more. Then he caught himself and muttered to Ricardo and his unseen siblings about the customer always being right. Father and son set down the food and walked away from the door, toward a gaggle of suddenly talkative kids.

Martha had no idea she was so hungry until she wheeled the table in. The meal was pure home cooking—scrambled eggs, fresh bread, jam, bacon, and unusual and delicious pastries that Graciela must have learned to make growing up in Peru. Martha savored every bite.

Then she moved to the bassinet. This impulse to look endlessly at the baby made Martha feel sheepish, yet she couldn’t resist sitting on the floor and touching the apple-round, irresistibly soft cheeks. The baby started, then relaxed, and Martha noticed how
her hands had been held as fists all this time.
The ability to make a fist is apparently instinctive,
she decided, thinking about the ways they had been put to use throughout history. She touched the tiny fist, wishing she could keep this baby from ever knowing about war—and then the baby opened her hand and grabbed Martha’s pinky. Martha giggled; the baby was holding
her
. Astounding.
A person comes into the world with a fist—and a grasp,
she thought.
Yes, we are built to fight one another, but also to embrace. How cleverly we are created.

Then Martha remembered Earl’s gaze averting when they passed a church.
Created,
she thought again. She herself had given little thought to how we are created or whether she wanted to resume attending church.

Yet there was so much to read on this perfect face, whose every feature had come from nowhere. No; every feature had come from a mother—who’d escaped a place so cruel, she wanted to hide her baby. This baby had also come from a father—who was not the numbered man. Was the father another resident? Maybe one with only the faintest understanding of what had happened between him and Lynnie? Maybe one who’d loved her, even if she’d not loved him? Though maybe she hadn’t even liked him. Maybe she’d been—

No, Martha could not let herself think that.

She quickly slid into other, perhaps even harder, questions. If the perfection of this baby’s face might be construed as proof of the divine, what did the imperfection of a handicapped body or mind prove? Did it argue against the existence of a larger power, as Earl felt after they’d buried their son? Or that, if there was such a supreme being, he could err?

The baby relaxed her grip, and Martha pulled her hand free.

Martha paced the room, running her hand through her hair. It would be unwise to drop into a spiritual abyss. She had too much
to think about and barely enough energy to run a bath. Hoping to divert her thoughts in the way to which she was accustomed, she opened the desk drawer and found stationery and a pen. She flipped through her address book, searching for someone to whom she could write a letter. Yet the correspondents who’d welcome theological questions would be stymied by her immediate concerns, and vice versa. Besides, she was hardly prepared to reveal her predicament. She laid down the address book, listening to the whistle of the wind, the baby breathing. She set the stationery before her. She picked up the pen. And as the ink made its first mark, she found herself writing a letter to someone with whom she’d never corresponded before. Using the fine penmanship that had led years of students into script, Martha wrote, “In case I am not around to tell you, here is how you began in the world.”

“Mrs. Zimmer?”

“Oh,” Martha said, startled, her hand to her chest.

She turned to the door, pages of writing beneath her hands. The room was dark again.

“I hate disturbing you”—this time it was Graciela, her voice softer than Henry’s and laced with her Spanish accent—“but you need a visit.”

Martha drew the door open.

Graciela stood in slacks and a turtleneck, holding a tray. “We worried when you didn’t come for dinner. I made you a nice meal. I brought fresh diapers, too.”

Did Martha detect a slight note of annoyance in Graciela’s voice? She did, after all, have several children to look after and a hotel to run. Of course she’d be annoyed that Martha wasn’t following the house schedule. How rude of her. “I’m so sorry to have put you out.”

“We were just worried about you.”

Fortunately, the baby began crying. “If you’ll excuse me,” Martha said, turning toward the room. “Would you mind putting—”

She felt the door give as Graciela came inside. “Please. I know what you are feeling. No one should do this alone.” She marched over to the bassinet and said, peeking in, “
Hola,
little one.” Then she set the new tray on the dining cart. “I will care for her while you eat.”