Jennifer was looking at Mrs. Blessing with a line between her eyebrows. It was the same line that Nadine had between hers, permanently, a kind of tattoo of ill humor.
“Jennifer is entirely trustworthy,” Mrs. Blessing added. “I can tell you that from long experience. What will you do if the child is sick? What about school immunization records? She may know more than either of us does about how to proceed here.”
“What child?” Jennifer said.
“He has a child,” said Mrs. Blessing, the soft line of her mouth gone now, its narrow band of probity back in place.
“Hey, hey,” cried Skip. “Wait a minute.”
“Oh, God,” said Jennifer Foster, looking away with disgust. “Not you, too. I am so tired of this. Doesn’t anyone take having kids seriously anymore? I remember at home how angry all the women were about the American soldiers who had gotten them pregnant and then just left, but here it’s exactly the same. Fathers who think it’s a big deal to let someone use their last name on a birth certificate.” The line between her brows deepened. “Oh, I know who it is. You knocked up that girl who used to work at the Red Lobster out on the pike. She was in my gym class freshman year. You can’t even let her live here with you so you can see your own kid?”
Skip could feel the color rise in his face as the shame and anger bloomed in his chest. He walked out the screen door and went over to the truck bed. Faith was awake, staring at the leaves on the copper beech overhead with a sleepy smile. Her eyebrows were still light as dandelion fuzz, and her eyes had faded from navy to a lighter blue, more like the sky. Something about her peach-pink face, and the smile, and the way she was, the way she was such a good baby and scarcely cried and didn’t get cradle cap or white-heads or diaper rash or all the other disgusting things he imagined Shelly’s baby got, made the shame disappear, and the anger rise in him along with the pride and love. He lifted her from the Portacrib and carried her into the house so that she was facing out, one hand around her chest, the other beneath her butt, with the kind of casual roughness he associated with a job a person knows how to do well.
“This is Faith,” he said. “She’s not mine. Or she’s kind of mine. Whatever. I’m her father. I found her by the garage in June, and I’ve been taking care of her ever since. You might be trustworthy, but you’re too quick to judge people as far as I’m concerned.”
“Oh, my God,” Jennifer said, and reached out her hands like it was a cold night and Faith was a fire. “Oh, my God. You are so adorable. Look at you. Look at her. She’s smiling right at me. Look at her eyes, how blue her eyes are. Come over here. Come here and see me, sweetheart.” The baby made a noise, half-purr, half-growl, as Jennifer pushed forward on the piano bench and laid her down the length of her legs. Faith held on to Jennifer’s fingers with her fists.
“So you see the difficulty,” said Mrs. Blessing. “She needs her immunizations, and soon, as I recall. I’m confident that I can persuade Dr. Benjamin that she’s some relation and that he will do it.”
“Dr. Benjamin doesn’t practice anymore.” Jennifer looked down and pitched her voice higher. “No, he doesn’t, does he, sweetie. He doesn’t take care of babies anymore.”
“He will do it for me. But what about the mother? What if some young girl suddenly decides that she’s made a mistake? Although what counts as a mistake nowadays is beyond me. It seems there’s nothing that counts against you young people. No one seems to care about the old rules.”
“They just pretend they don’t care about them,” Skip said, reaching for Faith.
“Oh, let me hold her some more,” Jennifer said. “Who is your mommy, sweetie?” She tilted her head to the side and the baby grabbed her hair and pulled until Jennifer’s chin was bent low. It occurred to Skip that babies had a way of making people exactly what they were but more so. Faith had brought out the rectitude and responsibility in Mrs. Blessing, the warmth in Jennifer Foster, and the capability in him, so that she had made him think well of himself. And having a baby made all those people who were piss-poor humans more piss-poor than ever. “I can ask at the ER,” Jennifer said, “but I think I would have heard if anyone had come in postpartum with no child. There’s a girl on one of those big farms by the county line who’s only fourteen and got pregnant, but she had her baby about three weeks ago and, from what I heard, her mother and grandmother went from calling her a whore to acting like she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread as soon as she delivered. There’s been a couple of girls I heard about who had babies without being married in the last couple of months, but that’s no big deal these days. I guess I shouldn’t talk. My parents didn’t get married until I was five, when we came over here. But that was a different situation.” Her head bent lower. “I need my hair back, sweetie,” she sang to the baby.
“She has a really tight grip, right?” Skip said. “Strong.”
“Does my mother know about this?” Jennifer asked.
Skip snorted. “Right,” he said. “Nobody was supposed to know, not even you. But someone found out, and now that someone has taken it upon herself to tell other people.”
“I have no intention of telling anyone except Jennifer,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I suspect we may need her help.”
“Well, don’t tell my mother,” said Jennifer. “She’s strange about things, especially things like this. You can’t be sure what she’ll do. Actually, I know what she’d say. She’d say it’s really yours and you just made this whole story up.”
“I’ve still got the box they left her in,” said Skip. “And the flannel shirt she was wrapped in.”
“So you know of no one who might claim this child?” Mrs. Blessing said, putting her hand on Jennifer’s arm.
“I don’t know of anyone who’s missing a baby, to tell the truth. I’ll nose around a bit, though.” Jennifer looked up at Skip. “I’m sorry I made you sound like a slime ball. Here’s all these guys walking away from their own kids, and you’re taking care of a baby that’s not even yours.”
“She’s mine.”
“Yeah, I get that. Can I play with her a little while longer?”
“She is a very good baby,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I must admit it. She’s no trouble at all.”
Meredith was sawing away at her lamb chop. “Nadine told me that you had a lightning strike,” she said. “And a blackout. That must have been sort of scary.”
“Lightning is more dangerous than most people think,” Meredith’s husband, Eric, said.
Lydia scarcely listened to them. She watched Meredith’s knife go back and forth like a violinist’s bow. “Nadine,” she called. “This meat is tough.”
Sometimes, often, nearly all the time now, she felt as if she’d outlived her own life. Madame Guernaire’s no longer made the cotton blouses she liked so much. The Times no longer ran engagement announcements, and they put divorces in the wedding announcements, as though anyone would want to be reminded on their wedding day that their previous marriage had ended in divorce. And four years ago she had gotten a card from the butcher on Third Avenue who had been sending her meat for fifty years announcing that he was retiring and closing his business. Even the butcher in Mount Mason, who had been hugely and publicly bitter about the meat sent to Blessings from New York—“No difference from what I stock, except that she’s paying a premium, I can tell you that!”—was out of business now. Nadine had to buy meat at the Mount Mason supermarket. The chicken tasted like sponge. And not even like real sponge, the yellow misshapen kind that had once actually lain at the bottom of the ocean and that still could be sent to her, thank God, from the pharmacy on the corner of Seventy-second Street and Lexington Avenue. The supermarket chicken tasted like that horrid manufactured sponge that Nadine used on the dishes.
“You can’t get good asparagus this late in the summer,” she said, picking up a spear with her fingers and then setting it down in disgust.
“Mother, you can get everything all the time now. You can get corn year-round. And tomatoes. Every
thing is shipped overnight from California or Florida.”
“I don’t call those things you can get in the supermarket tomatoes. I’m surprised you can, with the tomatoes we’ve always gotten here in the summer. Charles is taking good care of the vegetable garden. These are our own tomatoes and our own summer squash. I can’t imagine why Nadine thought we ought to have asparagus in September.”
Sometimes she thought that the world had lost its compass. Peaches were meant to be eaten in the summer, apples in the fall. Her mother had once seen a girl in dark shoes at a lawn party in June in Connecticut and turned away before she could be introduced. Miss Bertram had sent a senior home because she was wearing nail polish. It was clear nail polish, but nail polish nonetheless. Nail varnish, they called it then.
And sometimes now she wondered, improbably, whether the compass had been set askew to begin with. She looked at Faith sometimes, lying on the lawn in the growing dusk with a tent of mosquito netting around her and her Humpty Dumpty rattle in her hand, and wondered what all the old mores really meant. Lydia Blessing, who had been taught that illegitimacy was a curse and eavesdropping insidious, sometimes lay in bed with the baby monitor turned on on her bedside table and listened as though to chamber music to the faint sounds of the young man and the infant living happily together. Sometimes she forgot to turn it off as she fell asleep, and when the baby woke at three she woke, too, and heard the few irritated complaints and then the sound of Charles coming into the room. “Hungry again, huh?” he might croon. “All right, all right, it’s coming. Hold your little horses. Hold your little horses, you little honey. You little honey, you.” It was the language of love, and it had shifted her made-up mind on its lifelong axis. What did it matter how you got to that moment, so long as you got there in time?
“You’re looking well, Meredith,” she said now, turning to her daughter, and she was faintly pained by the look of surprise on Meredith’s face. What did it matter what had led up to that moment? Meredith suddenly looked pleased. “Thank you, Mother,” she said, lifting a hand to her hair. “You, too.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Lydia said. “You haven’t had surgery, have you?”
Meredith’s smile fell a little. “No, Mother. No surgery.”
“Good. I think all that is nonsense. Grow old, and learn to like it. Or live with it, at the very least.” The three of them bent over their meals in silence. The lights in the dining room flickered.
“I’m glad you decided to have work done on the orchard,” Meredith said. “I always loved it there when I was a child.”
“Who says I’m doing work on the orchard?”
“Nadine did.”
“Nadine should mind her business.”
Lydia didn’t like it when Meredith behaved as though the place were already hers. Lydia’s father had hated that, too, had hated it when her mother had deeded Blessings over to Lydia five years after Meredith was born. It was after Lydia had had Mr. Foster, the second Mr. Foster, drive her to the city in the big Buick for Lucy Warren’s wedding. It was the first big wedding after the war. “Oh, Lydia,” Lucy had said when she’d seen her outside the church, “I never thought you’d come.”
“But I sent you a card and said I would,” she’d said.
“Well, my mother said you never would,” Lucy had said, pushing aside her veil. Perhaps she’d imagined it, but Lydia thought that many of her old friends looked surprised when they saw her at the reception afterward, and one girl she’d scarcely known took her hands and told her how terribly terribly sorry she’d been about Benny, and what a wonderful wonderful man he’d been, and how was the baby, was she well?
“She’s scarcely a baby anymore,” Lydia had said. “She’s almost five.”
She’d stopped afterward at her parents’ house, but both of them were out, and she could not stay over because of Mr. Foster waiting in the car, his head swiveling as though New York were surrounding him on all sides and surreptitiously creeping forward to seize and eat him. Driving across the park, she’d realized that the city was like the pond at Blessings, that her life here had been a small splash, a series of concentric circles, and now the water was smooth again. She’d taken her gold compact out of her purse, the compact with her monogram that Mrs. Carton had given her for a wedding gift, and she’d looked at her own face in the mirror within the lid, touched her brow, her upper lip, to see that she was really there.
She’d been so tired when she got back to Blessings that day. Her garters had bitten into the flesh of her upper thighs and left red marks, and Meredith had come in while she was changing and tried to touch them, and she’d had to tell her that people needed their privacy when they were dressing and undressing. Now people changed clothes on the beach in front of strangers and thought nothing of it. People hired men to take care of their property, and somehow, out of the blue, infants turned up in their living quarters, needing to be held and fed and somehow cared for by these men who were supposed to be pruning the trees and keeping the creeping chrysanthemum from creeping.
But Faith was surprisingly easy to feed. Mrs. Blessing had done it twice now, once when Charles was out, once when he’d handed her the baby and the bottle. She had to hold her in her right arm now because her left ached so much of the time, and she worried that if the feeding went on too long the weight would be too much for her. But so far it had not. The baby sucked on the nipple with an avidity and a need that was somehow touching. Mrs. Blessing could not remember what it had been like to feed Meredith. The baby nurse had said she was inexperienced. The woman had rolled her r’s, so that inexperience sounded much more serious than it might have otherwise. She was German. Ethel Blessing always got the servants no one else wanted, the black cooks, the Irish girls with spaces between their front teeth, the German baby nurses during the war. It had occurred to Mrs. Blessing as she held the bottle while the child sucked noisily that perhaps she had never actually given Meredith a bottle.
She had been so young when Meredith was born. She’d been only nineteen years old when she’d gone to that drinks party she had dreamed of as an old woman in the hospital. Frank Askew had raised his glass from the other side of the room. He had given her that hard look that made her groin swim and her face turn red. She thought no one noticed. How stupid she’d been. How surprised everyone had been to see her, only five years later, at Lucy Warren’s wedding, as though it had been arranged for the earth to swallow her up. Of course her mother had wanted her to stay hidden away at Blessings.
Six months after that first time, Frank had reached into the neck of her yellow voile dress and pulled her breast loose to kiss its upper curve, and she had felt her knees bend, and open. His mustache scratched her skin slightly, and then he drew back and stared down at the dark nipple, the swell of the skin, and his pelvis stopped pushing against hers as though he’d been struck by lightning.
“You need to go get looked at,” he’d said, pulling the top of her dress up far higher than it was meant to be.
“Get looked at?”
“By a doctor.”
She was so stupid then that she had needed a man to look at the swell of her breasts and feel the slight curve of her belly and tell her she was pregnant. “Eleven weeks,” said the doctor in West-chester whom Frank sent her to see the next day. That night she went to Chez Nous, one of those clubs that had sprung up where girls who’d gone to college and come home again and men who were waiting to be shipped overseas went to have a good time before they got married, or had children, or surrendered to being grown-up. She’d had too much to drink, then insisted that everyone at her table go on the subway to a place she’d heard about downtown for breakfast. She was fast-talking and frantic that night, not like herself, and the New York she encountered was not her New York. It was an underground city in which strangers sat opposite one another on the train, eyes blank, shoulders touching anonymously. The New York she knew was the opposite of anonymous, in which all of them went to the same few schools and knew one another’s par
ents and the servants knew everyone else’s servants and everyone used the same apothecary and everyone’s children wore the same broadcloth coat with a velvet collar and matching leggings from The Childe’s Shoppe. It was, she was discovering, a small town in which things were secret, not because they were not known but because they were not spoken aloud.
The place she’d heard about turned out to be nothing more than an all-night luncheonette, but almost everyone there was someone they knew, except for one disgusted cab driver at the counter, eating sausages and making comments to the waitress about trust-fund babies and rich kids and uptown brats. Lydia threw up in the ladies’ room, which smelled like disinfectant and had a sign that said, DON’T WASTE PAPER—THERE’S A WAR ON. When she came out Benny was at a table by himself near the window, wearing his new uniform. The sleeves were too long, the pants too short.
“Keep me company,” he’d said. “Your brother stood me up.”
He was drunk, too, and when he ordered fried eggs she thought she’d be sick again. She had toast with butter, and tea that she drank in little sips. Neither of them said much until Benny reached over and took her hand. “What’s the matter, Lydie?” he said, and she started to cry. The only words that would come were “I need.” “I need I need I need” between wet sobs and heaves and then another trip to the ladies’.
“What do you need, Lydie?” he said when she’d come back.
“I need help,” she said softly.
“What kind of help?”
“I need someone to marry me.”
There was a silence. Benny buttered his toast. The cab driver said, “You can’t respect a person who doesn’t work for a living.” The waitress said, “Don’t be so hard on people.”