“But you must think of it a little bit,” Tennessee said. “I mean, you’re here now.” She put her hand on the back of her friend’s head, touched the little ropes of hair. She was here. She could feel her.
“Well, yes and no. It’s hard to explain. It really has more to do with you thinking about me.”
“But I used to think about you all the time and you never showed up before.”
“But now you’re sick.”
Tennessee worked this over in her head and concluded that either she was just imagining things or she was about to die. Neither thought appealed to her, but neither thought particularly troubled her either. Maybe it had something to do with the medication they had given her for surgery. “Did you know you were going to die that night?”
“Not one clue. Did you?”
“I did, but not until just before it happened. Even when we got to the hospital I thought you were just crazy sick. I’d been sitting in the waiting room half the night and all of a sudden I thought, She’s going to die, just as clear as if someone had said it to me. About ten minutes later the doctor came out and told me.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Tennessee Alice Moser said, and she meant it. It must have been awful for her, leaving that hospital alone.
“It was nearly three in the morning by the time I got home and I woke Mrs. Roberts up. I took Kenya back to your apartment and we slept in your bed. She didn’t even really wake up, just cried for a minute in her sleep and then settled down again. She was so good. She was right about eighteen months then, not too much older than Tip was when he went to live with the Doyles, but somehow when I looked at Kenya it all seemed so much sadder to me. It seemed like the cruelest thing in the world that this baby had to lose her mother. I couldn’t stop thinking that if we had just left for the hospital a little sooner…”
“You tried to get me to go.”
“I should have made you.”
Tennessee Alice Moser propped up on one elbow and looked at her friend. She brought her face down close. “You’ve been a mother too long. I said no. It was too expensive.” She smiled. She had those pretty teeth just like Kenya. God had given her a short, hard life but a perfect set of straight white teeth to help her endure it.
“You were the one who wanted to be a nurse. You should have known something about medicine.”
“Yeah, I knew I couldn’t afford it.”
In those better days when they were both alive and together, Tennessee had had the same apartment as her friend but she was three flights down. They both faced the street. They had the same little closet in the living room, the same bedroom that was not much bigger than a double bed. Tennessee had a better refrigerator because the guy who lived there before her was a junkie. He had torn the door off his refrigerator to put it in front of his window to block out the light, only it wasn’t tall enough and never could do the job. When they finally got him out of there the whole thing was beyond repair and they had to buy a new one. It wasn’t actually new but it was newer than Tennessee Alice Moser’s. By the time they got to be best friends, better than the sisters either one of them was born with, they had each other’s keys. They would run up and down the stairs in their nightgowns to borrow some money or lipstick or salt. Everybody called them The Girls, merged the two of them into one even though Tennessee was older, taller, lighter. She came from Rhode Island, though nobody knew that except Tennessee Alice Moser. Tennessee Alice Moser was as slim as a girl even after Kenya was born. She was darker, prettier, and launched into a state of perpetual movement. As close as they were, it was a long time before Tennessee told her friend about the baby she had at eighteen and how once he was born she found she could not take him home even though she had been planning to. She put down her story brick by brick, checking to see how Tennessee Alice Moser took what she heard before trying her out with the next chapter. There are some women to whom you could say, “I gave away my son,” and they will finish up their glass of wine politely and ask you a couple of questions but when they rise to say good night they are gone permanently. She knew this because her mother was gone. Her sisters were gone. The friends she’d had back in Providence, gone.
“Do you know where he went to?” Tennessee Alice Moser asked.
Indeed she did, though finding out had been an accident. Five days after her baby was born she saw an article in the paper that said a Boston councilman and his wife had adopted a son. It was on the bottom half of the front page, human interest on a slow news day and only news at all because the councilman was white and the son was black. She had walked to the Quick Trip to get away from her family and buy a Dr Pepper and saw it there, a big stack of papers by the checkout and the top one turned over to a white man and white woman holding a baby, holding him up to show his shining face to the camera. They were that proud of him, she could see that. They were proud of his beauty. Tennessee put down the soda and took the paper instead. She went and sat on the curb outside the store and she read. The article said they were naming him Edward but planned to call him Teddy. He was five days old. Anonymous sources were quoted as saying the adoption of this child amounted to political maneuvering, but that wasn’t true. She saw the picture. She saw the mother who was holding her baby. She saw the look on the woman’s face. Nothing political there.
“How did you know it was your boy?” Tennessee Alice Moser asked.
They were sitting in the living room, drinking wine on Tennessee’s mossy green sofa. All those years she had never told anyone and now she was telling because her friend was just that trusted, that dear. It felt like letting go of the breath she had sucked in on the day the nurse came and took him from her arms. It couldn’t be a bad thing to tell one person, not when you’ve been lugging the secret behind you all by yourself year after year.
“I had seen him. I knew he was mine. I knew because the paper said he was five days old.”
“But there must be lots of babies.”
“He was mine,” she said. “I knew my baby.”
“You would,” her friend said with deference, because at that time she did not have a baby herself.
“And when I got home I sat down and I looked hard at my older boy—”
“Your older boy?”
That was the complication, the thing that made the story into something unnatural. But once she decided to tell there was nothing to do but say every word of it. “I had an older boy at home. I was keeping him. I could manage with one. But after I saw that picture in the paper I thought, One of you is going to go on and have a very sweet deal, get an education, live in a nice house, be safe all the time, and one of you is going to stay with me. I wasn’t feeling so good then, and staying with me didn’t sound like anything but a burden this child would have to endure. I started to tell myself that it should be all or nothing, that doing it halfway was a disservice to them both. I had an idea that Tip, he was my big boy, could look after the baby, little as he was himself. They could be together and look after each other. So I went back to the agency I’d given the baby to and I asked them to make the call. The woman I talked to said I was wrong, that it wasn’t my baby with the councilman in Boston, but I said for them to take down my number anyway and to call me back. They called the next morning. I was right about it being my baby. I would have known him anywhere.”
Tennessee Alice Moser thought about all of this for a long time. She could see giving up a baby maybe. She could even see how that might be a good thing. But how did you give up the boy that you knew? The one you had fed from your body already, the one who had slept in your bed at night when he cried? “What did you call Tip back then?”
But Tennessee just shook her head. “He’s Tip.”
Even though she had told all of her story, she waited months before asking her friend if she wanted to come along and sit on a park bench in the South End and eat a sandwich and pretend to talk while the boys walked by them on their way to the Montessori school. Teddy was four by then and Tip was five and they each inte
rmittently held the hand of the redheaded woman and then swung their hands in the air. They were talking, talking, to Bernadette and then to each other, and she was talking back to them. As hard as the two girls on the bench tried they could not hear what was being said. Teddy laughed at something and then for half a dozen steps he hopped with his feet together. Tip kept his chin pointed up, looking at the formations of clouds.
“This is why you moved to Boston?”
“Yes.”
“Do you watch them all the time?”
The first time she had only come up for the day, thinking she would just hang around until she could get one look to see if they were okay, and then that would be enough. But it wasn’t enough. She tore off half of the sandwich without looking down and passed it to her friend, her best friend, the only person she had ever told. “It isn’t all the time.”
“My God,” Tennessee Alice Moser had said, her gaze trailing after them like the tail of a kite, “those are the most beautiful boys in human history. I have never seen anything like them in my life.” Even after they crossed the street at the end of the block and fell from sight, she kept her face turned towards the place they had been. She never said, What were you thinking of? She never said, How could you have let them go?
“Sometimes now I wonder,” Tennessee said.
“Wonder what?” Tennessee Alice Moser was there beside her in the bed and she pulled up the sheet and blanket as the room was cold.
“About what I did, giving up the boys.” Tennessee was confused now. They weren’t at the park. She wasn’t really regretting having let the boys go, not at this moment. She was regretting it all those years before. She thought she was saying it on that day they watched the children pass, Tip looking up, Teddy looking down. Tennessee Alice Moser says, They are beautiful, and she says in reply, What have I done?
“You’ll never know how things might have turned out,” her friend said. “Look at me. I wish I’d gone to the hospital sooner, though frankly I wonder if even then they would have put enough hustle into it to save me. I wish I hadn’t died and I wish that I could have been the one to raise Kenya, but then I think, Look how nicely she turned out with you. Even though there were some things I would have done differently, I have to say she turned out golden. That’s really all you can think. Your boys are good. They seem like happy boys. They may have turned out better with you and they may have turned out worse, but when you look at what you have to work with, you look at the way things are now, you’d have to feel it all went pretty much okay.”
Tennessee tried to pull herself into this present moment: her boys were grown, her friend was dead but here. She did not for the most part feel regret. She could look around the apartment she shared with Kenya, she could every now and then catch a glimpse of Tip walking into the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and she understood that the road from her living room to that museum would have been much, much harder than the road from Union Park. By offering them up, and by the blind good luck of where they landed, she knew she had given them something substantial, but that was not to say she didn’t add up the losses every now and then. For some reason the losses were presently sticking in her throat. “I know they’re good, but I always wondered how much they suffered from not having a mother. I never thought about them winding up with no mother.” Tennessee went through a time of terrible doubt after Bernadette died. That was not what she had bargained for, that Teddy and Tip would be motherless boys. She kept waiting, thinking Mr. Doyle would marry again, but all those years she never saw a woman with them at the symphony, at the lectures. The only woman she ever saw walking the boys home from school was the housekeeper. Sometimes she wondered if it was a job she should apply for.
Tennessee Alice Moser poked her in the shoulder. “It’s not as if they don’t have a mother, after all. They have a mother who’s willing to get run over for them.”
“You know what I mean. It does boys good to be around a woman.”
“Good looking boys like that? I’m sure they’ve been around plenty. And anyway, you can’t think about it like that. There’s always going to be something missing. There is for everybody. If you gave them a mother then they would have suffered not having a father,” Tennessee Alice Moser said. “Unless you think their father would have stayed around.”
For a moment Tennessee remembered that boy, how young he was, how his back had felt beneath her hands. It embarrassed her now to think of him.
“I think it would be nice if Kenya had a father,” Tennessee Alice Moser said.
“I’ll try and find someone to marry.”
At this her friend let go a laugh too long and too rich for a hospital room.
“You don’t think I could get married?”
She sputtered for a moment and then pulled the pillow over her face to calm herself. “Really?” she said. “No. No, I don’t. You don’t tell anybody anything. Who’s going to marry someone who doesn’t talk?”
“I talk. I’m talking to you.”
“You need to talk more. You should have made some other friends. Even if you didn’t get married you could have done that.”
“How was I going to make friends? I couldn’t tell them about my boys or about you or Kenya or even what my name was. I don’t know how much there is after you take all that away.”
Tennessee Alice Moser ignored her and settled her head back into the cradle of her crossed arms. “It would have been nicest if you could have married Mr. Doyle. I always thought that one day he was going to look up and see you. He was going to say, ‘Excuse me, miss, but we must have an awful lot in common, seeing as how we are always going to the same places.’”
“He’s old,” Tennessee said. “He’s white. He used to be the mayor.”
“None of those things have hurt your boys.”
“And he’s never seen me. I’ve spent the last twenty years making sure of that.”
“He saw you last night.”
Tennessee covered her face with her hands. She could feel the gentle tug of the IV needle in her vein. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.”
“Just be grateful. You’re going to need help and he’s the person who’s going to help you.”
“I wouldn’t take anything from him.”
“With Kenya,” she said, her voice at once so certain and so calm it seemed to take her by the hand and walk her forward. “He’s going to have to help you with Kenya.”
Tennessee would never say it, not even to her best friend in the world, but she did in fact have a fondness for Mr. Doyle that was a sort of affection. After all those years you get to know a person even if you’ve never spoken to him. She could tell that his moods were consistent for the most part and that he was fair. So many times she had seen him carry Teddy asleep to the car when he was young, or put a light hand on Tip’s back when they were walking. He never pandered to the boys, he wasn’t trying to make them into friends instead of sons, but he was proud of them, as proud as she was, and they had grown up in the light of his pride. She had seen him waiting for them, she had seen him frustrated, but she never heard him raise his voice or turn away when they were talking.
As a mayor there were things he could have done better, but as a father she had never faulted him. She did not fault him for trying to steer them towards politics. Tennessee understood that. What Mr. Doyle couldn’t see was that the boys, while bright and dear and brave, knew nothing of sacrifice. They had never been asked to give anything up, not like Mr. Doyle had, not like she had. Even the place where Bernadette had been, Mr. Doyle filled that up by giving them twice as much of himself. And while she’d wished that he would find someone else, some nice woman who would replace what they’d lost, she often wondered if he felt that his wife was in fact irreplaceable. She imagined that he did not love her any less for being dead. She knew how possible that was. “I guess Kenya could stay with them for awhile, until I was healed up.”
“At least you know he’ll look after her.” Tennessee
Alice Moser smoothed the covers out over them with the flat of her hand. It seemed like she was going to say something else, something important, but as long as Tennessee waited it never came.
“The boys would be good to her. She’s always wanted to know them. She wants to have brothers.”
“And she’d have Sullivan, too.”
Sullivan, yes. He would be the easiest with her. He would be the one to buy her dresses. He would take her to Africa someday. “I had a dream that he came to see me.”
“He did come to see you.”
“Really?” Now Tennessee had to think about it all over again. She was sure she had imagined everything.
“I think he has some problems,” Tennessee Alice Moser said.
“The truth is Tenny, we all have problems,” Tennessee said. “I have a new hip.”
“And I’m dead,” Tennessee Alice Moser said, and laid an arm across Tennessee’s chest and closed her eyes so that they could both get some sleep.
Chapter 9
KENYA AND TIP STOOD ON THE CORNER OF UNION PARK AND LOOKED DOWN THE LONG, SNOWY EXPANSE OF TREMONT for as far as they could see in one direction and then they turned to face the other. They found the world divided into three neat layers: blue sky, red brick buildings, white snow. The plows had come through in the very early morning and pushed everything from the middle of the street to either side, forming banks as high as Kenya’s shoulder. She had to crane around them to see, but there really was nothing to see. The snow that was left on the street was packed into a hard white permafrost as impenetrable as the asphalt itself. When she scanned the few brave cars that skittered around with all the traction of ice cubes, none of them were taxicabs.
“What time is it now?” Kenya asked.
Tip didn’t look at his watch. “Eleven o’clock.” The cab was so late and they were so restless that they had decided to wait it out on the corner, but going to the corner did not produce the car. Tip was weighing it out: the wind, the cold, the crutches, the girl, the promise to his father that they would take a taxi, the likelihood of the taxi actually materializing in the next hour. Beneath her coat, Kenya was wearing a track suit brought from home. She was wearing Tip’s backpack on her back and she had to lean slightly forward to counterbalance the weight of the books.