Silk and Stone

  “Well, I suppose not, but why?”

  “Because he deserves it. Because it’s the responsible thing for parents of our status to do.”

  “If it makes you happy.” William cuddled the baby and stroked his curled fingers. “I’d like to name him Timothy, after my … after my and Sarah’s father.”

  “Certainly. I’d love to think that gesture would make your sister feel more generous toward me. Maybe she’ll see that I want to be friends with her—and that our children should grow up playing together, like cousins ought to.”

  William sank into a chair beside the bed and looked at her tenderly. “No one will ever say you don’t have this family’s best interests at heart.”

  “I don’t want to be an outsider. I don’t want people to be suspicious of me. Oh, William, I hate that your tenant farmers think I caused the trouble for them. There’s no way I can prove my visit was innocent. I was such a fool for encouraging them to tell me all about their homemade liquor. Of course they think I was prying into their secrets, when it was just my clumsy way of showing polite interest.”

  “Shhh, I know that.” He rocked the baby in his arms with absurd delicacy for such a big, bearish man. Alexandra took a deep breath and added, “You’re going to think I’m cruel for what I say next. But I’m thinking of you. Of us. Of what we have to do to protect our good name—Timothy’s good name.”

  William shifted uneasily. “I do believe you want what’s best. That’s not cruel or selfish. Tell me.”

  “No matter how sad it is about your tenants, or how harmless their intentions were—they broke the law, William. You’re a judge. You have to set an example. We can’t have your career ruined by people saying you condone criminal activity whenever it suits you. And you know that as soon as those men come home, they’ll be back at their stills.” She reached out and entwined her fingers in his. “You have to put those families off your property.”

  He protested. He cajoled. She insisted. She cried, and begged him to consider how he’d explain to their son why he’d let personal sentiment override the sanctity of the law. In the end, she won. He sat with his head bowed to Timothy’s, beaten. She controlled him with the very qualities that had drawn him to her; her unbending pride and beauty, and the steely grace that had seemed so charming when they first met. It shamed him to love her more than his own conscience, but he could not stop. After so many years of self-denial and loneliness as he played the role of both father and mother to Sarah, as he toiled in his law practice single-mindedly and rose to a judge’s bench by the dull forces of intellect and unending attention to others’ problems and needs, she was the one gift he had given himself.

  It shamed him to need her pampering so much, to slavishly pursue her gratitude and her willing sensuality. He was humiliated but unable to deny her anything she wanted for fear he’d lose her. There was no looking back now.

  That night, for the first time in his sober and dignified life, he drank heavily and sat in the dark of his office, in the home that had been his family’s for generations, the Pandora ruby lying in the palm of his hand. He had given her everything dear to him. His name, his home, his protection, and his self-respect.

  Chapter

  Three

  “Atmen Sie aus, Frau Ryder. Atmen Sie aus.”

  Breathe out? Frannie thought desperately. The pain was so bad, she couldn’t remember how to breathe, much less which way. “Ja,” she answered in the middle of a groan, her head arching back on the sweat-soaked pillow, her gaze fixed blankly on the ceiling of the bedroom in her and Carl’s tiny apartment. And then, as her updrawn legs convulsed and she thought the baby was going to rip her apart, she called, “Nein, nein! Oh, shit!”

  “What is shit?” the German midwife asked, huffing. “Push, Frau Ryder.”

  “She’s dying,” Jane Gibson said darkly. Jane, the wife of a staff sergeant and a cheerful friend ordinarily, was kneeling on the bed with her hands wound around one of Frannie’s fists. “She’s been in labor for a day and a half. This is crazy! We’ve got to take her to the base hospital.”

  “Too late for the Krankenhaus, ja,” the midwife muttered. “The baby, it comes out.”

  And it did, like a piano squeezing through a keyhole, while Frannie screamed. If she were dying, she didn’t see her whole life flash before her eyes, but only the last four years—four miscarriages in four years, and a platoon of army doctors patting her head while they told her and Carl to keep trying. Four years of hope, failure, and heartache had driven Frannie to this point. She didn’t believe in doctors anymore.

  Carl did though. Thank God he was away on maneuvers for two weeks and didn’t know she’d been studying natural childbirth. He was unhappy enough, already, about her interest in bizarre ideas.

  “Oh, Lord, she’s not breathing!” Jane yelled. Frannie heard the words dimly as the agonizing pressure inside her slipped away. I am too breathing, I think, she decided. No, the baby. She means the baby. Frannie lurched upright, staring in horror at the limp blue baby girl lying between her legs on the bloody sheets.

  The midwife enclosed the baby’s head in her beefy hands, bent over her, and closed her mouth over the baby’s entire face, it seemed. “What the hell are you doing?” Jane screamed.

  Frannie pushed at Jane’s hands, which were grabbing the midwife’s curly gray wig. “She’s giving her air,” Frannie explained. She leaned forward, shaking, praying. “Please let her be all right. Please don’t let my stupidity kill her.”

  The baby shuddered. Its frail chest puffed out vigorously, and the incredibly delicate-looking arms and legs began to move. The midwife sat back, hoisted her across Frannie’s abdomen, and lightly slapped her rump. A faint, angry wail filled the room.

  Frannie huddled over her daughter, crying, stroking slick wisps of blond hair on the baby’s head. “Do you think she’s hurt?”

  “She’s mad,” Jane said, collapsing beside them. “And Carl is going to be mad as hell too, if you tell him how this went. You could have delivered this baby hours ago, in the hospital, with a nice spinal block and a pair of friendly forceps to help you, instead of only me and this … this Aryan soothsayer.”

  “Hush. Everything’s all right. I’m sure.”

  But she wasn’t sure, she was terrified, and later, when the baby had been cleaned and dried and put in her arms, she looked down into her eyes and swore she saw rebuke. “Don’t be upset with me, Samantha.” she whispered. “I love you. I really, really do.”

  “Samantha?” Jane sipped a cola and sat, cross-legged, on the end of the bed. The midwife ambled in from the kitchen, belching and taking deep swallows from a mug of dark beer.

  “Carl and I talked about it. Sam for a boy, Samantha for a girl.”

  “Family name?”

  “No.” Frannie brooded over that, thinking about Alexandra and the rest of her family. She didn’t write to anyone but Alexandra, and even her letters to Alex were dutiful. Alexandra sent pictures of her son, who was almost four now, and brief, polite notes occasionally. Frannie thought her sister had not forgiven her for having the courage to run away. “She’s named for Elizabeth Montgomery.” Frannie told Jane finally.

  “Huh?”

  “Samantha. On Bewitched.”

  “You’re naming your daughter after a TV witch? You want your kid to grow up being named after a witch?”

  “A good witch,” Frannie corrected her. “Like the good witch in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Huh? That witch was named Samantha too?”

  “No. She was named Glenda. The point is, there are good karmas and bad karmas, and Samantha represents the good.”

  “Karmas?”

  “Never mind.” Frannie rubbed a fingertip across one of the baby’s tiny hands. “Look at these beautiful little hands. Frau Mitteldorf, would you read her palm for me?”

  “Oh, jeez,” Jane said, and left the room.

  The midwife shuffled over and sat down heavily beside them. Balancing her beer on one broad
knee, she pressed the baby’s right hand open and peered at it. “Gut hands,” she proclaimed.

  “Good? Really?”

  “Ja, good luck in her hands.” The woman squinted and frowned. “She will need it.”

  Frannie was too guilt-stricken to ask why.

  Almost two years passed in agonizing denial before Frannie admitted that something was wrong with Samantha. “Say ‘Daddy,’ ” Carl coached every morning, hunched beside Samantha’s high chair while his breakfast turned cold. And every morning Samantha solemnly smeared baby cereal on her mouth and said nothing. “Say ‘Mama,’ ” Frannie would croon. “Look, Carl, she almost did it.” Frannie was sick with fear.

  But every morning Samantha merrily whacked her baby bowl with her spoon and simply stared at them.

  One evening, sitting in the living room watching Samantha, Carl threw his newspaper on the floor, scrubbed his hands over his eyes, and muttered hoarsely, “She can’t talk or won’t talk. This is killing me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her.” Frannie huddled next to him and struggled—as she did every day—not to cry. Samantha sat on the living room floor, appearing cute and normal in a pink jumper, as she solemnly stuffed bits of twine into a shoebox, then pulled them back out, arranged them in neat rows on the carpet, then put them back in the box. Her chubby little hands were extraordinarily graceful and precise. “She has a real love for order,” Frannie noted hopefully. “Just like her adoring daddy.”

  Carl grunted. “She’s training to be a pack rat.” He sat on the floor, and Samantha toddled over to him, grinning, as he held out his arms. “You’ll make a damned fine pack rat too,” he said. “But I’m taking you to another doctor.”

  That specialist did the same tests as the ones before him, and told them the same thing: He could not diagnose the mystery that kept words locked inside their little girl.

  On her second, silent birthday, Carl paced the living room with his hands knotted in his trouser pockets, watching her methodically examine a stuffed bear, her eyes bright, her hands quick. “She’s not an idiot,” he announced loudly. “Goddammit, I don’t understand her. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s not feebleminded.”

  Two years of guilt flooded Frannie with confession. She made a garbled sound and blurted out, “Something’s wrong with her, and it’s my fault.”

  Carl halted, rammed his hands through his short-cropped hair, and stared at her. “What?”

  Frannie shivered. “I lied to you. She wasn’t born at home unexpectedly. I was so afraid something would go wrong if I went to the hospital—everything had gone wrong with our other babies. I’d heard about a German woman—a midwife who specialized in natural childbirth—no drugs, no doctors. When I went into labor, and you were away on maneuvers, I called her.” Frannie sank to their small, rump-sprung couch and put her head in her hands. “I was in labor for over thirty-six hours. When Sammy came, she wasn’t breathing. The midwife had to help her. Oh, Carl, I’m sorry. I hurt our daughter somehow, and I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “You put our baby in danger to test out some damned fool idea about what’s ‘natural’?” Carl’s voice shook with anger. “I’ve tried my best not to make fun of your queer ideas, but this is the limit.” Frannie looked at him miserably as he flung a hand toward Samantha, who had stopped playing to stare at them with huge, worried blue eyes. “What’s natural about a two-year-old who can’t even say ‘Mama’ and ‘Daddy’?”

  Frannie straightened, crying silently, but determined. “She will talk. I know she will. And when we have another baby, I won’t take any chances. No more midwives. No more ‘natural’ anything. Nothing but good, modern, dyed-in-the-wool methods. I swear.”

  “I don’t think we ought to have another baby until we get this mess straightened out.”

  “Carl!”

  Frannie rose and reached out to him, but he shrugged her hands away and left the room. Samantha, her eyes filled with tears, chirped sadly.

  At the wise old age of six, Jake already knew what he was: a tuning fork. A tuning fork like the one on Mother’s straight-backed piano in the living room, and that was why, Granny explained, he could hear a kind of music no one else could hear, the music of hidden things, lost things. Eleanore was the same way. Ellie didn’t ponder their uniqueness the way he did. It worried him—being different. At a county fair he had seen bottles filled with baby animals so strange they’d died before they were even born. Tiny, two-headed calves, and three puppies joined at a single pair of hind legs. He’d asked Father if there were children, somewhere, like that—dead little babies floating in bottles, with extra parts. Father had looked at him oddly and answered—Yes, son, at medical school I saw babies like that.

  Did someone kill them because they had extra parts? Jake had asked, horrified. And Father—who didn’t beat around the bush (that was what Mother was always telling him)—said most times they just died on their own, and it was nature’s way of making sure they didn’t suffer.

  But what about the ones that don’t die on their own? Jake persisted. What if Ellie and I had been born with extra parts?

  Father had had to think about that a minute. Well, I’m a good doctor. I’d just have cut them off, he said. Then he turned Jake around, felt his arms and legs, his back and stomach, looked into his mouth, and said, Nope, nothing there that isn’t supposed to be there.

  Jake had wanted to confess that he and Ellie did have an extra part—like Granny—only no one could see it. But the fear that Father might look at him as if he ought to be in a bottle was too awful to risk. He explained this problem to Ellie, and she agreed that they’d better keep quiet.

  So they didn’t tell anyone, not even their parents, that they were tuning forks; Granny was the only one who knew, because she was a tuning fork too. She was their teacher—a whole lot more interesting than any teachers at the elementary school, in town. They happily toted Granny’s spade and pick for her on long walks into the mountains to hunt for rocks, and she showed them how to tell what was what: garnets and topazes, aquamarines and sapphires, and when the music was very, very sweet, rubies.

  Most were just rocks, Granny said, but some were so special, she took them to a jeweler in town and sold them.

  Being able to find things was a sacred gift, Granny said, a secret gift that bad people might try to steal or use if they knew about it. And the mountains were full of watchful spirits—big, coiled Uktenas who hid in the deep pools of the rivers, trouble-making elves and tricky witches who would pounce if they learned how powerful Jake and Eleanore were.

  The world of the people was turning upside down, Granny explained. There were strangers on the high ridges outside town now, strangers who put gates on the roads to their fine new houses, strangers who cut down the forest and planted more grass than a million cows could eat, strangers who played games like golf and tennis, which they didn’t want to share with anyone else, strangers who bought the old buildings in town and filled them with beautiful, useless things they could sell only among themselves.

  The scariest thing was, the world outside the mountains was in just as much of a mess, Granny said. Hard as it was for her to believe, shows about sex, dope, and naked people were going on up in New York, right on the same street where Grandpa Raincrow had taken her to see Annie Get Your Gun. More than 30,000 soldiers were dead over in Vietnam for no good reason Granny could figure. The space people were getting ready to send men to the moon—who could know what horrible evil might come from meddling with the moon?

  And a bunch of fools had added division playoffs to baseball.

  Over smoky campfires Granny told them all her stories and gave them all her secret warnings, and they listened, hypnotized. Everybody loved Granny, and she’d lived a long, long time without anyone noticing her extra part. As long as Granny was okay, they would be okay too.

  Jake decided odd people had to stick together, and look out for each other.

  Another year passed, and Carl’s grim silenc
es began to match Samantha’s innocent ones. Desperation made Frannie forget her vow about not seeking unorthodox help.

  Madame Maria was a transplanted Italian, the wife of a German bureaucrat who worked in the mayor’s office, and she gave psychic readings every Wednesday afternoon in her small, cluttered house on a back street where the windows were so close to the sidewalk that the cats who lounged in the flower boxes flicked their paws at the hair of unsuspecting visitors.

  One of the cats had pulled a clump of hair loose from Frannie’s long braid, and Frannie toyed with the hair nervously with one hand while the small, sparrowlike Madame Maria gripped her other hand. Madame’s little living room was as pretty as a dollhouse; Madame looked like a faded porcelain figurine, with rigidly permed blue-gray hair even her cats couldn’t destroy.

  “You have a problem,” Madame said in a guttural, soothing accent—English overlaid with Italian and German. “You have come to see Madame Maria because you need help.”

  “It’s my daughter,” Frannie said, forgetting her hair and letting her hand drop wearily to the table between them. “She’s almost three years old, but she’s never spoken a word. We’ve taken her to doctors. They can’t find anything wrong with her.”

  “Ah, your daughter. I suspected. I feel your … fear. And your guilt. You wonder if you caused her silence, some way.”

  Frannie leaned forward eagerly. “Yes. God, yes. She was born at home. I should have gone to the hospital, but I believe in natural childbirth. My husband was away, and I didn’t tell him what I intended to do. I hired a midwife, and I almost died. I didn’t tell my husband the truth for a long time—I prayed our daughter was all right, but when she didn’t start talking …” Frannie swallowed hard and looked away.