Eden Close

  He was attractive to Andy too, though differently, and primarily because he was not a dairyman, like Andy's father and most of the other fathers Andy knew, but a salesman. That he only sold metal parts for farm machinery didn't bother Andy; it was the fact that Jim frequently left home for other places that seemed so grand. He was the first man Andy ever knew who routinely traded in what seemed to be barely used cars for new models every year—always a Buick and usually black, sitting gloriously in the gravel drive, making his own father's old Fords look like dusty country cousins. It was the traveling, he thinks now, that made Edith panicky in the mornings when Jim left her, sliding his hand down the curve of her narrow hip before he swung open the door of the Buick. He would lay his arm along the rim of the leather seat and back the Buick out the drive, waving cheerfully when he hit the road as if he were the only happy man in town.

  And instantly she would be preoccupied, standing in the gravel drive long after he'd gone—as though he'd taken her with him. She would appear surprised and distracted if Andy's mother called to her—which Andy sometimes thought his mother did just for spite—and nearly deaf if he himself had to ask her a question about a chore or the whereabouts of a tool.

  The worst, though, was her indifference to Eden. Even when Eden was small and her mother held her on her hip, Edith would seem for long seconds or even minutes to be oblivious to the child's entreaties—Eden, who seemed to have dimension and life in Edith's eyes only when Jim returned from wherever he had been.

  HE REMEMBERS it as clearly as a just-told story, or he thinks he remembers it; it is hard now to sort out what he actually remembers on his own—this, his first true memory with a story and a plot—and what he might have been told later by his mother or his father or by Eden herself and then sketched into the picture he sees in his mind.

  It was summer then too, he remembers, though earlier, fresher, June perhaps. A fine day, the morning, because his father was at work. And Jim, too, was traveling, because Andy's mother that night, using the phone, found him in a motel near Buffalo and called him home. Andy was in the garden with his mother. He remembers the scent of the soil, an evocative aroma he has not smelled for years, and a row of radishes, the fat red globes pushing up from the black earth. He was happy and rather proud, because his mother had said he could pick them. He remembers that he was wearing brown leather shoes and white socks and that the gap between the shoes and the socks was filling up with black dirt.

  Edith came across the yard and stood by the gate in the wire fence. She was holding a bundle, wrapped in a yellow towel, in her arms. He knew at once, by the way she cradled it, that it was a baby—though possibly (the thought crossed his mind) it was the Closes' cat, sick somehow. The fact that she might just appear on a random morning with a baby didn't strike him as odd at all; friends of his mother's often just appeared at their door with new babies. It was much odder that the cat might be sick; after all, Andy had just seen it that morning, and it had seemed fine. It wasn't until he saw his neighbor's face, and then felt the way his mother got up from her knees to go to her at the gate, that he knew something was terribly wrong. It was a baby, but perhaps a sick baby, he thought.

  "Edith," said his mother. He knew in the name there was a large question.

  "I was vacuuming in the kitchen. And when I stopped, I heard a sound," said Edith Close. "It was a strange sound. I thought it was the cat, whining. Or a hurt bird. It was out front somewhere, and I wanted it to stop."

  She was wearing, he remembers, the kind of dress she always wore—a dress with a narrow waist and a top like a shirt, with sleeves she rolled to the elbow. Her forearms were narrow, and she had on gold bracelets. Her hair was parted in the middle and hung straight behind her shoulders, as she often combed it, in a style that would become fashionable years later with younger women. He remembers the bright red lipstick on her mouth, and that her face was white.

  "And when I went to the door and opened it, there was ... there was this cardboard box, out near the road but just inside the privet hedge. It said Oxydol on the side, and I thought someone had thrown their garbage onto the lawn like they sometimes do with the beer bottles. And then I heard the sound again, and I was angry because I thought someone had left us a litter of kittens, and I knew how hard it would be to get rid of them....So I went to look, and the box was open and filled with towels, and this was in it, crying...."

  Andy's mother leaned across the wire fence and pulled a bit of the material away from her neighbor's arms.

  "Jesus God," said his mother, stepping back quickly as if she'd seen something deformed.

  The two women stood looking at each other for a moment and didn't speak.

  "What is it?" his mother asked finally.

  The other woman didn't understand the question. "What is it...?"

  "A boy or a girl?"

  Edith looked momentarily stunned. Then she tilted her head back and closed her eyes. "Oh God, I wish Jim were here," she suddenly cried. "I don't know. I don't know." She looked as though she were about to fall, with the bundle in her arms.

  "We'll go inside," said his mother quickly, clicking into gear in that way she had when there was a crisis or when he had fallen and hurt himself. "We'll look at the baby and make sure it's all right and call the police. Then we'll find Jim."

  She turned to look at Andy, crouched in the dirt. Her face was unusually cross. She spoke in the voice she used when she "meant business," and pointed her finger at him.

  "You are not to leave this garden under any circumstances. Do you understand me?" It was not a question. "You stay here and you don't move until I come back for you. I have to go next door with Mrs. Close."

  Chastened and frightened, for she had never left him alone with no adults around, he watched them walk toward the other house and disappear inside the back door.

  THAT WAS the first intruder, he thinks suddenly to himself, not the man who came in the August night, but the person who brought and left a child on a June morning fourteen years earlier. A parent himself, he tries to imagine what he has never thought of before: a woman stopping her car, the swift movement around the hedge. Had she hesitated, wept, bitten her lip for courage? Had a man or a boy brought her and insisted that she do this? Was she a young girl, a child herself, or an older woman with too many children to feed? Why that house and not another? Had she been driving up and down the road, searching for hours for the perfect doorstep? How had she been certain there was someone at the house to care for the baby?

  "It might have been us," his father said that night at supper. His voice was unusually quiet. "It could so easily have been us."

  And but for the accident of the other house facing the road, and theirs, seventy feet back, facing north, he came to understand, he might have had a sister, and that the fate of the child who would be called Eden had been determined by geography. And as he grew older and heard the story often repeated, it was hard for him not to think of her as a near sibling, someone who might have been called Ruth or Debbie, as his mother planned to call the daughter who never came, and that she might have been his and theirs.

  BUT BEFORE the day was out, she was not anyone's but Jim's. Andy's mother heard it in his voice on the telephone from Buffalo.

  "How did he take it?" asked Andy's father when his mother put down the phone.

  "He's coming right away. He sounded ... well, he just sounded very excited. And he asked the queerest questions," she said. "For a man."

  "What questions?" said his father.

  "He wanted to know ... well, he wanted to know how much it weighed and how old it was, and what it looked like, and what the doctor had said, in all the details," she said, smoothing her hands along the front of her apron. "Like a woman," she added, but, of course, not like the woman who ought to have asked those questions, her voice implied.

  And then his mother shook her head and sighed: "Poor man." For they all knew that the baby would be taken away as soon as the police could arrange for a place
in an orphanage or a foster home. When the police had come that morning, accompanied by Dr. Ryder, who examined the child, they had asked Mrs. Close if she would keep the baby until the matter was settled, and she had said yes but had not suggested that she herself wanted it. And yet it was common knowledge, as Andy's mother had reminded his father (and had later incorporated into the oft-told tale of Eden's arrival), that Jim especially wanted a child and that they had been trying for years to conceive one, despite Dr. Ryder's pronouncement that the environment of Mrs. Close's womb was "hostile" to Jim's seed. An irony not lost on anyone.

  THE MUSCLES in Andrew's right shoulder are screaming when he sees a red Honda Prelude pull smartly into the gravel driveway. It can't, at that speed, he thinks, be another chocolate cake from the Ladies Guild. A man unfolds himself from the driver's seat and snaps the door to as neatly as a soldier. He wears a tan summer suit and a pair of dark aviator sunglasses. His hair, which Andrew last remembers seeing unwashed and wild behind his ears, is short and trim. The man puts his hands in his pants pockets and grins.

  "Andy-boy."

  "T.J."

  Andrew begins to back down the ladder. Tom Jackson lowers the sunglasses along the bridge of his nose and peers at Andrew. "Nifty," he says.

  Andrew looks down at the anachronistic bell-bottoms. "They were in the closet," he says, and shrugs.

  "Hey, listen," says T.J., losing the smile and advancing toward Andrew with his hand outstretched. "I'm really sorry about your mother. I just heard this morning. A client said..."

  The two men shake hands. "It was mercifully quick," Andrew says inanely, parroting the words of Dr. Ryder. He realizes suddenly that the job of the bereaved is to allay the embarrassment of those who come to offer solace.

  "Yeah, quick, that's the way to go," says T.J. He takes the sunglasses off and hangs them by a stem from his jacket pocket. "You're looking good, Andy-boy," he says, lightly punching Andrew's arm. "You workin' out?"

  Andrew has not been working out, but he knows from the way T.J. has said it and the square look of him that he has and that he devotes some time to it. When they were boys, it was always T.J. who would arrive early for practice.

  "No," says Andrew apologetically. "I was running for a while, but I moved and I lost it."

  "You gotta have discipline," says T.J., the fastest skater Andrew has ever seen, a skater who seemed to hover effortlessly over the ice. "You gotta make it a habit. Every day, no matter what. You gotta stay in shape. Hey, man, forty's just around the corner."

  Andrew has not thought of forty quite that way before, if, indeed, he has thought of it at all; but the soreness in his shoulders is telling him that he is not as young as he thought he was.

  "Want a beer?" he asks. Andrew's memory of the landscape of his refrigerator is vague, but he thinks there may be the remnants of a six-pack he bought the day before at the mini-superette.

  "Sure," says T.J. He turns with a flourish to let Andrew know that he is examining the black BMW in the driveway. He whistles appreciatively. "You must be doin' OK," he says. "Hey, I thought I was doing good, but a BMW. Whadda they go for now—twenty, thirty?"

  Actually Andrew is embarrassed by his car and has been since arriving at the farmhouse. It sits in the drive looking as out of place as a woman in a mink at a garage sale. It also makes him anxious in a way he can't precisely define.

  "To tell you the truth, I'd rather have your Prelude," says Andrew, lying graciously, since he would not for one minute own a bright red car. "The BMW's too temperamental," he adds, compounding the lie; the understated black vehicle runs as smoothly as a panther.

  He leads the way up the back stoop and into the kitchen. With relief he sees that there are three Heinekens on the top shelf of the fridge. T.J. takes the tan jacket off and drapes it carefully over the back of a white kitchen chair. He rolls his neck, squares his shoulders and leans against the sink. He pops open his beer. Despite his lack of interest in working out, Andrew is impressed by T.J.'s flat stomach.

  "So what's it been? Ten years?" asks T.J., taking a long swallow.

  Andrew, leaning against the fridge, calculates. "I think it's more like fifteen or sixteen," he says. "I think the last time we got together was seventy-one or seventy-two. We went to see Tom Rush over Christmas break. I think."

  "Sixteen years!" says T.J., exclaiming. "Jesus H. Christ. It sounds like something my old man used to say." He shakes his head. "Holy shit."

  He runs his fingers up and down the beer can, making patterns in the condensation. "So whadda you do now?" T.J. asks. "You in business or what?"

  "I'm with a pharmaceutical firm in the city," Andrew says. "I'm vice-president in charge of marketing and advertising." In this farmhouse kitchen, his job description sounds absurdly pretentious, but T.J. nods his approval.

  "You were gonna be a writer," T.J. says.

  "And you were going to be a musician. Keyboards."

  "Yeah."

  "One thing leads to another," says Andrew, for something to add. He doesn't particularly want to go into the specifics, however, of how smoothly he was "led" into moving to New York and taking his first job with the pharmaceutical firm. Nor into the specifics of how quick Martha was to see, in that move, certain financial possibilities.

  "Yeah," says T.J. "Right to the bank."

  The two men laugh.

  "To money," says T.J., raising what's left of his beer in Andrew's direction.

  Andrew raises his can in response.

  "You married?" asks T.J.

  Andrew shakes his head, "I was. We were separated about a year ago. I have a son, Billy. He's seven."

  "Hey, man, I'm sorry," says T.J. "About the split, I mean. That's rough. Your idea or hers?"

  Andrew reflects that this is the second time in ten minutes T.J. has said he is sorry for Andrew—three if you count the scolding over not working out.

  "I guess it was mutual, the way those things are," he answers evasively.

  "Yeah, right," says T.J., draining the last of the beer. He puts the can on the counter.

  "Have another," offers Andrew.

  "No. Can't. Thanks anyway. I got a corporation this afternoon wants to see the Gunther farm. For condos. Could be a fantastic deal."

  "You're in real estate," says Andrew.

  "For now," says T.J. "But developing is where it's at. The old farts are selling their land—the kids don't want to farm anymore. So what else is new, right? It's condos now—working couples, retirees, they don't want to have to mow the lawn. I had a deal about a month ago—a developer who bought the Gorzynski place and is putting in a country club with condos, a golf course, a pool, the whole nine yards."

  T.J. picks up the empty beer can. He puts it back on the counter. "You gonna be around awhile?" he asks. "I'd like to get you out to the house to meet the kids. I married Didi Hanson, by the way."

  "My mother wrote me that," says Andrew. He has an image of Didi Hanson's perfect teeth, a blond flip, and matching sweaters and skirts, long after the girls he knew were wearing jeans. He also remembers that Didi was a cheerleader and that she took it seriously, like a course.

  "We've got two boys ourselves. Tom junior's fourteen now, a handful. Ellis, the little one, is nine going on two, if you know what I mean."

  Andrew isn't sure he does, but he nods. "I'd planned to stay a week," he answers, "fixing up the place before I put it on the market."

  As soon as he says the word market, an unwelcome suspicion enters his thoughts. Has T.J. sniffed a potential sale and come looking for a client? Do real estate salesmen routinely read death notices in the papers? Or, to give his friend the benefit of the doubt, did T.J. really hear of Andrew's mother's death only this morning from a client? He can imagine the conversation: I'm sorry to hear that, T.J. would have said, immediately calculating how to get the edge, the same quality that, in another era, had made him the best hockey player the county had ever seen. Her son, Andy, and I used to be real close friends.

  "You sell
ing?" asks T.J., too casually, bending down and peering out the kitchen window, as if something out there had caught his attention.

  "I guess," says Andrew.

  "Really," T.J. says, standing up but not quite meeting Andrew's gaze. "Well, shit, you need a hand, I'd be glad to help out—for old times' sake, like. To be perfectly frank, I don't really handle such small layouts these days, but seeing as how we're old friends..." He looks around the kitchen as if eyeing it afresh, but Andrew has the sudden and distinct impression he's been taking inventory since he walked in the door.

  "Whadda you want for it?" T.J. asks.

  Andrew shrugs. "I've no idea. What do you think?"

  "It's in pretty bad shape," says T.J., "and pretty isolated except for the Close house, and that's not an asset, if you follow me....I dunno, maybe a hundred. One twenty-five."

  Andrew nods. He is certain that T.J. has made these calculations earlier in the day. They fall from his tongue too quickly.

  But since Andrew hasn't committed himself to any other real estate agent, and because he wants only to make the transaction as painless as possible, he begins to see the arrival of T.J. as remarkably fortuitous, if not entirely coincidental. He wonders if T.J. feels the same awkward distance from their friendship as he himself does—or if he even cares.

  "Be my guest," he says.

  T.J. shakes his hand. "Excellent," he says, smiling and giving himself away completely. "I'll be speaking to you later about the details, and as soon as I talk to Didi, we'll have you around. I'd pick a date now, but I have to ask Didi—you know how women are."

  Andrew winces inwardly. He doesn't know how women are any more than he suspects T.J. does, but there is something in the use of the cliche that tells Andrew that his friend's marriage isn't good. The knowledge surprises him—and then he wonders if perhaps he's mistaken, if the marriage is only not good that day, that week, that morning. If T.J. had come by last week, he wonders, would Andrew have sensed a different marriage? One more intimate, more hopeful? He knows that for most of his own marriage, its character often changed from one day to the next, depending sometimes on circumstances, sometimes on whether or not he and Martha had made love that morning.