Lost

  And then, despite her missed exit, the snarl-up, the downpour, the rush hour, she wasn’t late after all. Damn.

  “Someone’s been here before us,” observed the older woman in the mulberry windcheater, pocketing the keys. She flopped her hand against the inside wall to knock a light switch. The air was stale, almost stiff. A few translucent panels overhead blinked, and then steadied. Winnie noted: It’s your standard-issue meeting room. It proves the agency’s fiscal prudence and general probity. A few tables with wood laminate, sticky with coffee rings. Fitted carpets of muddy rose, muddier in the high-traffic zones. Folding chairs pushed out of their congregational oval. As if whatever group that met here last night had cleared out with rude speed.

  “Someone’s been here, but not the cleaning crew,” said the woman. “They don’t pay me for housekeeping. Oh, well, come in, and we’ll set ourselves up by ourselves.” A veteran in the social work world, wearing one of those grandmotherly rain hats like a pleated plastic freezer bag. She wriggled out of her jacket, which was a bit snug, and she smiled sourly. Her nylon sleeves hissed as they slithered.

  Other rectangles of light kicked on. Outside, obscured by the reflections flaring in the broad plate glass, a few more couples emerged from cars. Women huddling under the arms of their husbands, the human forms smudged into anonymity by the rain. The observable sky seethed in slow motion over Wellesley, Needham, and this patch of Newton.

  Winnie, on edge because of the accident, because of the challenge of the day, hung back in the doorway for as long as she could. She pictured the Weather Channel’s computer-graphic impression of the storm. Moisture trawled in from the Atlantic, unseasonable icebox Arctic air sucked down over the Great Lakes, a continental thumbprint of weather, fully a thousand miles broad. A thumbprint slowly twisting, as if to make the undermuscle of the world ache.

  She harvested the details; that was what she was good at. That was all she was good at. Anyway, that was what she was there for, and no apologies. She noticed that, as more fluorescent tubes kicked on, everything became more manufactured, more present, the shadows cowed and blurred by multiple light sources. This Styrofoam coffee cup fallen on the carpet. This chair turned on its side, FF scrawled in Magic Marker on its seat.

  By the moment the leader grew more cheery and despotic. She brisked about. Winnie and the other supplicants hung back: this wasn’t their terrain, not yet. Over their chairs they hung their London Fog knockoffs, their L. L. Bean Polartec parkas, and, in one instance, a retro fox fur suffering from cross-eye. “A little bit of leftover Hurricane Gretl, they tell us,” said the leader. She addressed the spatter against the windows. “You. Stop that. It’s supposed to be too late in the season for you. So long. Scram.”

  Thunder blurted, a distant throat-clearing of one of the more cautious gods.

  The leader was undaunted. She made her way past the bulletin boards shingled with curling color photographs. Hands on hips as she surveyed the detritus of discarded handouts, crumpled napkins, spilled sugar. “Look at this mess. A group of Forever Families having their quarterly meeting, I bet.” In one corner, toddler-size furniture squatted on its thick limbs. The leader swooped, collecting things. She stepped on a stuffed monkey, and it complained with a microchip melody playing, inevitably, “It’s a Small World, After All.” Winnie turned away, busying herself with a small notebook and a pen.

  “If you help yourself to that old coffee, be it on your own head,” said the leader. “I’m telling you. Nobody even bothered to put the milk away overnight. Do they pay me to be the mother to the world? They do not. But I’ll do a fresh pot in a minute. You, you can’t listen to me? You can’t wait? Go ahead. Be my guest.”

  The balding young man with his hand on the lever of the thermos said in an apologetic murmur, “Sorry. I’m groggy. I didn’t sleep all night.”

  “Caffeine addiction. Let me take a note.” This was only pretend terrorism, since the leader followed up with a pretzel of a smile. “Name tags, name tags?” she went on. “People, please, as I get the brew going, find your name tags, people. We’re starting late, but that’s okay: the rain, the traffic, we’re not all here. I’m not all here. Name tags, people. Here’s mine, I’m Mabel Quackenbush, or I was last time I checked.”

  Winnie frowned. Surely she’d been incognito in her application? She’d meant to be Dotty O’Malley, a favorite alter ego she adopted on bowling nights. But there was her badge, staring out at her amidst the Murrays, the Pellegrinos, the Spencer-Moscous:

  * * *

  W. Rudge

  * * *

  Obediently W. Rudge slapped the gummy-backed label to her Tufts sweatshirt, but she arranged her drenched scarf to conceal her name. Then she took a place in the circle of chairs as near the back as she could. When they were all settled, the leader said, “I’m the Forever Families coordinator for today. Mabel Quackenbush, from the Providence office. We had twenty-three registrants. I don’t know where everyone else is. If I could get here, anyone could. Believe me, I-95 was no treat thanks to Hurricane Whosie. I left at seven and we crawled.” Mabel Quackenbush embroidered the uninteresting story of her journey. A warm-up and a stalling tactic, as new arrivals tiptoed in, shook the wet off their coats, and settled in their chairs.

  The room became close. A mothball fug aspirated off damp woolens. Winnie wanted to see who the rest of the registrants were, but she looked at their reflections instead, at the streaked imprecise flatnesses in the windows.

  Out of the many-colored earth

  That eats the light and drinks the rain

  Come beauty, wisdom, mercy, mirth,

  That conquer reason, greed, and pain.

  John Masefield, if she remembered correctly, who linked reason with greed and pain. Or was it de la Mare? There was that habit again—some people did it with pop songs—of giving one’s life a soundtrack. In her case, snippets and sound bites of doggerel.

  Don’t diagnose reason, greed, or pain, she corrected herself: simply observe the symptoms.

  Mabel Quackenbush turned her head this way and that, ducklike. She knew her job. She drew folks in. The skin on her chin was loose, an unbaked cinnamon roll. Behind her half-lenses her eyes blinked, as if with slow washes of albumen. She was beginning to look earnest. Please God, no opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

  She tried to nip that crankiness in the bud. Winnie, she said to herself, go easy on these folks. Be fair. You haven’t been here ten minutes yet. Don’t you cut them into pieces. Let them do it to themselves, if they’re going to.

  “Nine-fifteen, and we’re still missing, let’s see, five couples,” said Mabel, counting. “Well. Latecomers will have to fend for themselves. Now. So.” She had fanned piles of photocopies at her feet. She peered down at them dubiously, and then said, “First things first. The name thing, the round-the-room thing, a word or two: who you are, where you’ve come from this morning, anything personal you want to share about why you’re here. No pressure.”

  Winnie shrank into her sweatshirt. In Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, Alice could smallify herself by sipping from a tube of something that said DRINK ME, but in real life you only shrunk inside.

  “Chat,” ordered Mabel Quackenbush.

  The couple hunched in their folding chairs at Mabel Quackenbush’s left was required to start. Joe and Cathi Pellegrino. (Durham, New Hampshire.) Joe talked, Cathi saturated a Kleenex until shreds of it clung to her cheeks. Four stillbirths. Four.

  Next, Cookie and Leonard Schimel. (Braintree, Massachusetts.) Leonard had the limp, Cookie had the fox fur. Leonard a legal practice, Cookie the ache that derives from a hysterectomy. They both had money, but only Leonard had style.

  Then came the Spencer-Moscous. (Brookline with summers in Provincetown.) A gay couple. Geoff was a recording technician for Channel Five and Adrian taught fourth grade. The Pellegrinos, the Boudreaus, the Murrays, and the Sch
imels glanced warmly at the Boys.

  The Fogartys didn’t smile. Winnie practiced summing them up in a remark: they look as if they spend their highway hours inventing biographies of anthropomorphized meadow animals who all end up as roadkill.

  “W. Rudge,” said Maisie Quackenbush.

  “Here,” said Winnie.

  “W? Wanda? Wilma?”

  “W.” Oh, all right. “Winifred.”

  “And you hail from?” said Mabel, as if Winnie were a slow contestant on a talk show who somehow had slipped through the screening process and needed prodding.

  “Came up from the Cape this morning, but I live in Jamaica Plain,” said Winnie. “Unmarried.”

  Mabel, waiting for more, glanced at some papers. When the silence lengthened, she said, “Well, glad to meet you, Wini-fred.” She put the stress on the last syllable, which seemed unnecessarily hostile.

  The wives inched nearer to their husbands, grateful for them. To her right, the Boys grinned at Winnie with a solidarity she didn’t feel. She tried not to notice, and turned inquiringly to the next pair.

  Murray, George and LouBeth. (Billerica, Massachusetts.) Infertility of a private nature.

  The Boudreaus. (Weston, Massachusetts.) Their two young children had died of smoke inhalation when a Guatemalan au pair forgot to check the lint trap. Hank Boudreau had insisted on trying again, but Diane was too far into the Change.

  The room got quiet. Someone cleared her throat. Someone crossed and uncrossed his legs. Despite her best intentions, Winnie found herself thinking that Diane Boudreau had sacrificed any claim to pity by being such a shameless bottle blonde.

  Finally, the Fogartys. Malachy Fogarty, previously of Dublin. (Currently Marblehead.) Mary Lenahan Fogarty was unsettlingly petite, a clutch of narrow limbs in a wraparound skirt and three sweaters. “Postanorexic,” she confessed, “with all that that entails.”

  “And so, the theme of the day,” said Mabel in a quieter voice, taking off her glasses and tasting the tip of the earpiece before putting them on again, “is loss. We all suffer from loss, or we wouldn’t have come today. Simple as that. But no matter which loss has brought us here, what Forever Families does is recovery. Recovery of the possibilities of life. Knit the wounds and heal the scars and do something for someone else. And maybe, accidentally, for ourselves. Now: here’s the commercial.”

  Every business has its lingo. Wounds, scars, recoveries. The lanolin blather of the compassion industry. But Winnie allowed that though Mabel Quackenbush looked as if she’d take no prisoners, at least she was up-front about the sales pitch.

  At first Winnie scribbled some notes. Mabel had the spiel down cold. Mission statement, Commonwealth accreditation status, history. Forever Families operated in nine states as well as the District of Columbia. It had been profiled in Boston magazine three years ago. Copies coming around.

  But then Winnie’s mind wandered. She watched the ripples of rain sliding down the smoked glass. Curtaining the reflections of the eager and frightened faces. She found herself capable of being easier on her fellow applicants when studying them in glass.

  The vacant-wombed wives. The husbands. Winnie supposed that the Brookline Boys, technically not really husbands, were mid-to late thirties, but the other fellows in the room were midforties at least, and Malachy Fogarty older still. Each husband was bigger than his wife, each husband sat back in his chair as his wife leaned forward, each husband looked prosperous and wary. Each wife looked nuts.

  Sunk low in the guts of the building, a furnace began to hum louder, as if trying to drown out Mabel’s pitch for Forever Families over other local agencies. The infomercial won. Mabel blinked at them with mercy in her eyes, mercy overlaid by a proper respect for the cash of clients shopping in the baby market.

  Winding down, she intoned, “For most of you, there is a Precious One in your life. Maybe already born. Out there. Waiting. You’ve already taken the first step. Congratulations on brooking our hurricane, which Forever Families scheduled to winnow out the sheep from the goats. Now let’s have our coffee, shall we? Fifteen minutes, people. When we come back, I’ll give you the skinny on the legal angles of international adoptions, we’ll review issues of health and welfare, we’ll do some other fun and games. Then after our lunch break, we’ll have our visit by a Forever Family, the Stankos from Pepperell. They have three Precious Ones from Moldova.”

  Suddenly Mabel Quackenbush looked exhausted, as if she’d rather be home tucking into a Sara Lee coffeecake than sorting papers with the tips of her shoes. “Stretch, now. Scatter and chatter. Look at the displays.”

  Winnie wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but as the only solo registrant she was a natural target for a social worker on the prowl. So Winnie hid in a herd of other bleary registrants and lined up for a cup of lukewarm water flavored with coffee stains. When she’d dumped enough sugar in it to make it tolerable, she headed for the hall, hoping to stand outside in the covered walkway and light a cigarette. But one of the Boys ambushed her by the coatrack.

  “Are you a Scrooge or a Cratchit?” he said.

  She flinched and laughed, blushing. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Was this Geoff or Adrian? They both reeked of the benignity that middle-class professional gay men seemed to prize these days. “I’m a humbug, if that’s what you mean,” she went on, trying to be honest, though it wasn’t her strong suit.

  Unforgivably forward, he reached out and opened her scarf so it spread across the bosom of her sweatshirt. Within the latticework of the intertwined sprigs of red-berried holly was stamped the image of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig dancing with Christmas cheer. Eight, ten, a dozen pairs of Fezziwigs, cavorting in perfect synchronization.

  “It’s the famous illustration, I recognized it,” he said. “I read A Christmas Carol to my fourth-graders every December. I know the Fezziwigs when I see them.”

  This silly Bond Street scarf, a Christmas present from John Comestor some years back. “I can’t remember if you’re Geoff or the other one,” she said, to change the subject. “You put your sweater on over your name tag.”

  “Adrian. Adrian Moscou.”

  “Of the Spencer-Moscous.”

  “Oh, that. Boy, you sound appalled. Not that I blame you. That’s Geoff’s thing. He’s the one in the family way. But Geoff and I didn’t sign up as a hinged name, not today. Too risky, considering what’s at stake. Our Precious One. I suppose the Forever Families staff ran our Social Security numbers through a computer check, because Spencer-Moscou is how the phone company lists us.”

  “Creepy,” said Winnie. That must be how Forever Families got her real name. W. Rudge. She had signed up as Dotty O’Malley, hadn’t she? These days her memory wasn’t reliable.

  “It is creepy,” said Adrian Moscou cheerfully. “Well, it’s a creepy day. Hurricane Gretl—whoever heard of a hurricane this late in the year? More proof of global warming, I guess. Now, are you going through this process on your own or is there a partner waiting in the parking lot?” Meaning, probably, was she a dyke.

  “Which one of you is going to be the mommy?” she countered.

  “Well, neither of us wants to be the daddy,” he said, without taking offense. He shrugged. “I guess we’ll just be like the virgin governesses from Victorian novels, and spend our lives in the service of a Precious One who never bothers to learn our names.”

  “Innocent and heartless,” said Winnie.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  “What James Barrie said children were like. In Peter Pan. Innocent and heartless.” The actual sentence had been gay and innocent and heartless, but Winnie wasn’t up to uncorking that line of camp.

  The Pellegrinos drifted over. So did Malachy Fogarty, munching antacids. Now for the capsule histories. These folks, free on a workday morning?—they didn’t need to adopt children. They needed to share. To get in touch with their inner childlessness. They were the reason Talk Radio wasn’t called Listen Radio. Winnie treaded the oily waters with a blan
k expression, preparing caustic observations to serve John Comestor tomorrow when she got there. He’d love all this. But when the Pellegrinos regrouped to mutter with the Boudreaus, and Malachy Fogarty bolted off, hunting for the men’s room, Adrian Moscou said, “I know, you must be the reformed Scrooge, and you’re here to adopt Tiny Tim.”

  She couldn’t bear to be thought of as being sentimental as everyone else here. Tiny Tim indeed. The coincidence of Adrian’s lighting on the Scrooge reference was shocking and even upsetting, but really, she thought: Tiny Tim? Anything but. Out of nerves, or pride, she admitted, “I’m not here to adopt a child. Only to observe the process. I’ve got a novel in progress, and I’m researching. Every little bit helps. You know.”

  “Neat,” he said. “Cool. We’re the raw material?”

  “Well, you have to admit, it’s ripe stuff. Baring our souls like this.”

  “Embarrassing. But you do what you gotta do. At least it’s all in the service of something other than ourselves.”

  “That’s what we say, anyway,” she said. “Some of us lie to ourselves better than others.” He raised an eyebrow, not sure what she meant. She found she was glad that Mabel Quackenbush was ready to reconvene. She excused herself from Adrian Moscou. When Mabel Quackenbush started the next portion of the program by asking if there were any questions so far, Adrian raised his hand.

  “Ms. Rudge here is a writer,” he said. “She’s doing research on a book. That makes me wonder about who gets to see our applications? How secure is the private material in our files?”

  “Oh, a writer,” said Mabel Quackenbush. “I didn’t know, Winifred. How nice.” She had seen everything before and knew how to handle this one. “Would you like to tell us more?”

  Winnie wouldn’t really. But her cover was blown. She looked everywhere except at Adrian Moscou.