Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  There’d been a party for the kids that night, and Ada slept over at Willa’s. On the drive home, Jack seemed preoccupied, staring through the windshield, mulling over some despicable notion. When they got home, he insisted she have a drink with him and fixed her a gin and tonic. They sat at the kitchen table drinking and she watched her husband transform into someone else, a version of his monstrous father, and he told her that at the party it had occurred to him that his father had been right about the Jews after all. “They just can’t help themselves,” he told her. “The way they spend money. Like pigeon shit, it’s everywhere you look.”

  “They wanted it to be special for Willa,” she said.

  “Oh, it was special all right.”

  “It’s their money, they can spend it any way they want.” She got up and started for the stairs.

  “I never knew you were so light on your feet,” he said.

  “He was a good dancer.”

  “I saw you out there. Don’t think I didn’t.”

  “I’m going to bed. You’re drunk.”

  “Come over here.”

  “Good night, Jack.”

  Jack nodded, prudently, and finished his drink. Then he got up and rumbled toward her and caught her wrist and held her there so she couldn’t move. “I saw you,” he said. “I saw your face.”

  “Jack.”

  He pulled up her skirt, rifling through the layers of fabric to her control-top panty hose, but she twisted free and ran up the stairs to the guest room and locked the door. She lay awake all night, convincing herself that it wasn’t his fault, the way he’d turned out. Growing up with that awful man had done it to him. Her husband’s fascination with money and the people who had it—real money was what he called it—had been in his head since childhood, when he’d stare out the window of his mother’s station wagon at the pretty houses in whatever town his father was based in, wondering what it might be like to live in one. To Jack, money was the school yard bully, sticking out his tongue, taunting in maniacal singsong, “You can’t get me, you can’t get me.”

  Jack was still chasing him.

  Thunder woke her at half past six on Sunday morning. She sat up in bed, alone. The house smelled of coffee; Jack was already up. The bedroom glared with brooding indifference and suddenly it began to rain. The rain fell heavily on the roof and ran through the gutters. She pulled herself up and sat on the edge of the bed. She felt light and empty. She remembered how hungry she’d been the night before and how she hadn’t succumbed to it, reciting her reasons methodically, like a prayer. Now her belly was flat and she could feel the bones of her torso pushing through. Rising from the bed, she felt a little weak, as though she had finally recovered from a prolonged illness, but of course that wasn’t true, she was in perfect health.

  Pulling on her robe, she went down to the kitchen to find her husband. The house glimmered with silence. A watery, greenish light filled the living room as the rain poured down the windows. She stood there for a moment, looking out at the lake, its surface dimpled like a sheet of hammered tin. Mozart was playing softly in Jack’s study, but when she looked in, expecting to find him hunched over his work, the room was empty. The lamp was lit and a cup of coffee sat on the desk. The window was open and rain was splattering on the windowsill, sending sparks of water onto a stack of papers just below it, the applications for the Sunrise Internship. The Sunrise Internship was awarded annually to the brightest female student at Pioneer and was especially impressive to colleges. Two afternoons a week, the student volunteered at Sunrise House, a women’s shelter in Pittsfield. Bette Lawton’s application was on top, which suggested, perhaps, that Jack had chosen her. There was no surprise there. Certainly, Jack would give the internship to her. Ada, whose grades were nearly as good, would undoubtedly be second on the list.

  Maggie shut the window, absentmindedly taking a sip of Jack’s coffee, which was nearly cold. Under the applications was another stack of papers, an enormous unruly pile—she didn’t have to look at it to know what it was. Jack’s unfinished dissertation on the poet Ezra Pound, a man Jack obsessively marveled, was a relic he resurrected from time to time, when he was in one of his states. Like an unrequited love affair, the manuscript comprised years of study that had amounted to absolutely nothing. For the past twenty years, Jack had carted around the unwieldy stack of papers, promising her— threatening her—that one day he’d finally finish it. Although neither of them would ever speak of it, the manuscript had become a symbol between them of their ultimate failure as a couple—of dreams turned to dust. She was a failure just as much as he was. When he’d had the affair with his thesis adviser, a woman ten years his senior, Maggie had wanted to leave him and he’d begged her not to.

  She’d caught them one miserable evening—he hadn’t come home for dinner. It was her first Mother’s Day, and she’d made a special meal. She’d waited over an hour, and when he didn’t show up she walked over to campus to look for him, carrying little Ada on her hip. The PhD students had offices on the fourth floor of the Classics Building, tiny rooms behind shaded glass doors. The building had emptied out for the weekend and Maggie climbed the stairs with growing anticipation, hoping to surprise him, imagining the pleasant disruption, but as she turned down the corridor under the dim, failing lights, another feeling took hold. Sweat prickled under her arms and Ada began to fuss. Approaching his door, she could hear them, a chorus of unbridled pleasure, and although the glass was shaded it wasn’t hard to tell what they were doing. As a result, the adviser resigned her position, and Jack had been asked to leave the program.

  She heard his car pulling up in the driveway. He was carrying a brown paper bag from the grocers. He came in and looked sorry to see her. “You’re up early.”

  “The rain woke me.”

  “It’s miserable.” He took a carton of milk out of the bag. “We were out.”

  “I meant to market yesterday,” she apologized.

  He grunted and his eyes seemed to say like everything else you meant to do.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, then carelessly added three teaspoons of sugar, spilling some of it on the table. The white grains reminded her of an hourglass—all the hours she had been with him since the day they’d married—and she wondered now why she hadn’t left him. For all these years the question had persisted in her mind. It was always there, creeping up on her. When he ate noisily, it was there, when he slurped his coffee, it was there, when she picked up his laundry, it was there, and when he woke her in the night for sex, it was there too. But a woman in her situation, with a reputation to protect, couldn’t just pick up and leave her husband. For one thing, there was the school. People in the community looked up to them. They represented grace and civility and what’s more, people trusted them with their kids. You had to earn that trust, and both she and Jack had spent years cultivating it. And second and perhaps most important, divorce wasn’t good for children. Almost half of the students at Pioneer came from broken homes, yes, that’s what she called them, politically correct or not they were still broken, and you could see the strain in their faces. You could see a lingering malcontent, as though they’d been cheated somehow. Raising children took two parents, she’d always believed it, and Ada adored her father. In Maggie’s mind, divorce only refuted the vital premise that what is started must be finished. Sticking something out, for better or worse, was no longer a prerequisite to having a meaningful existence, and quitting no longer brought on castigation—whatever makes you happy seemed to be the popular reasoning—why, then, couldn’t she adapt it to her own situation. She couldn’t help thinking that divorce, with its brawny spectacle, was the definition of personal failure. “I told you so,” she could just imagine her mother’s response. She’d never wanted Maggie to marry Jack in the first place. Her mother had said to her, “There is nothing redeeming about being a schoolteacher’s wife. You’ll be darning old socks for the rest of your life.” Maggie had never told her parents the real reason why Jack hadn�
��t finished his PhD. Instead, they’d celebrated Jack’s first job at St. Timothy’s, a Catholic military school in Hadley, where he’d taught Latin for four years before taking the job at Remington Pond.

  She’d made her bed, she decided. And she was lying in it.

  Later, in church, she took his hand, wanting to let him know that she was there if he needed her, but he hardly seemed to notice her. She had known for some time that he wasn’t himself. There were little things; the drinking for one, ice trays in the sink every morning and the rinds of lemons and limes. She would find him late at night in his office, staring blankly at his own reflection in the black window. It was a known fact in their calling—she still believed that’s what it was, a calling—that after seven or eight years in one place it was time to move on. Working with the same people, the same trustees and parents year after year could drag you down. Ultimately, like some shopworn piece of merchandise, you wore out your own authority. But aside from a few of his standard complaints—the kids weren’t as clever or as polite or as empathetic as they used to be and neither were their parents—Jack had remained optimistic until now.

  Father O’Rourke paused a moment and people shifted on the hard pews and coughed and blew their noses. Jack looked glum and preoccupied. She looked around at the congregation, many of whom she knew, and wondered: Are they happy? It was true that her life had become an elaborate fabrication, she had finally admitted it to herself, but she had no other solution for getting through it. It wasn’t easy being in her position as “first lady” of an elite private school. She tried to ignore her feelings—it was selfish to dwell on herself—but she couldn’t seem to do that anymore. A dark mood had wrapped itself around her and would not let go. As if reading her thoughts, her husband glanced at her abruptly and she quickly wiped her tears and shrugged apologetically. He gave her an ominous look, and turned his attention back to Father O’Rourke. Maggie always cried in church, she couldn’t help it. It was the only place that moved her. It was the only place where goodness actually seemed like a viable possibility. And nobody saw her. What did he care? She couldn’t even begin to imagine how her husband felt about their life together. They didn’t talk about it. There were many subjects that they avoided. Sex, for instance, was a conversation that seemed too daunting to bear, and their infrequent intimacy, always initiated by Jack, verged on the perverse—of course she could speak of it to no one. It was a side of her husband’s personality that she didn’t understand, and yet she knew that for him, marrying someone like her had been an error of judgment. Somehow, though, it made her feel guilty. Like she wasn’t enough for him in some way—and she rationalized his treatment of her as punishment for all she simply couldn’t be. The last time he’d taken her by force, and she’d bit him on the hand. He’d had to wear a bandage all week, which inevitably summoned the concern of the parents, the mothers in particular, who gushed and fawned all over him, pitying his alleged encounter with a rusty lawn mower.

  She didn’t know why Jack did those things to her. She didn’t understand it. She didn’t know why he didn’t love her more. She was a good wife; at least she tried to be. Her housekeeping might leave something to be desired, she knew, but there was a certain semblance of order because of her—the stacks of mail, the dishes, the laundry—Jack wouldn’t be caught dead doing laundry—and she was an excellent cook, everybody said so—but perhaps they were lying to her. You couldn’t be sure what people really thought. In the classroom she was at her best, she gave a hundred and ten percent to those kids, even the ones who were trouble. Even the ones that couldn’t do the work, like the Squire boy, and the kids genuinely seemed to like her—of course they did!

  After Mass, everyone went outside on the lawn. The rain had stopped and the sun glared through the heavy clouds. The wet grass seeped into her shoes, and she felt a chill, but it was too early to leave. Across the lawn, Ada was standing with Monica Travers. Monica had come to the school last year, after being thrown out of Nightingale in Manhattan for photographing herself naked and transmitting the image across the Internet. The girl’s mother, Greta, was an editor at some la-di-da fashion magazine in the city—divorced, of course. Maggie had warned Jack that it was a mistake to accept her, but he was always a step ahead of her, and sure enough, two months into the school year, the girl’s father dropped ten grand into their discretionary fund.

  Ada draped her arms around Monica like they were best friends, although Maggie knew differently. It was all an act of course. The girls with their silly games. Monica had started a trend at the school of wearing very dark eyeliner and, as a result, many of the girls walked around like versions of Cleopatra. Ada’s complexion looked sallow, and she had broken out in pimples; Maggie thought she might have her period. They never discussed personal things. Over the course of the year, her daughter had contracted a randy conceit, rolling over the waistband of her plaid skirt to raise it up an inch or two—they had spoken to the girls about such behavior and still they continued to do it. At least she hadn’t gotten her belly button pierced like Willa Golding. When that had happened, Jack grounded Ada for her friend’s mistake. There had been quite a scene between the two of them. Jack had warned Ada that if she ever did anything like that he’d send her to a place like Remington Pond, with all the weird kids. In his rarer moments of reflection, he would relay lectures by his father, a failed army chaplain, who would stand over his son shouting: “Sheep or shepherd, son. It’s either, or. There ain’t nothin’ in between!”

  The way Jack saw things the kids in Ada’s class had caught a virus of the mind, the cure for which no parent could supply. In his determination to “treat” the virus, Jack organized a lecture series on a variety of subjects from drugs to eating disorders and enlisted Father O’Rourke, who gave a lecture on abstinence to the students, presenting them with a selection of chastity rings that could be purchased through the church—much to the uproar of many of the parents, who called Jack’s office to remind him that their school was a secular institution and that his abstinence campaign was out of line. But the rings were pretty, fourteen carat gold, and almost all the girls wanted one regardless of their religion, whether they had boyfriends or not. Maggie had agreed to pay for Ada’s, which had the saying Faith written on it. Willa Golding, of course, had refused to buy one, gliding across campus with an air of superiority as though she were above such commitments, and her father was so irate he had threatened to pull her out of the school, but Jack’s glib, sensible explanation satisfied him in the end. “Sheep or shepherd,” Jack told her, victoriously. “People just need to be told.”

  The wind was picking up, a shower of yellow leaves. Ada gave Maggie a little insouciant wave and started down the hill with Monica, into town. “Be back at five for supper,” Maggie called, but Ada didn’t turn around and the words stayed in the air like balloons at a party where nobody showed up.

  The church bells were ringing. She felt a headache coming on. The air was damp, cold. She wanted to go home and make a fire and read the paper, but Jack wasn’t ready to go. Across the lawn, he was talking to a couple from Pioneer—the Madisons. The wife had a compact, angular build like Gumby, with short legs and arms. Jack was his usual gregarious self. He wore his good nature like a well-tailored suit and people liked him, they liked his wavy brown hair, the way his mouth turned down at the corners with a self-deprecating frown, the way his blue eyes reeled in the impressionable eyes of the mothers, who hung on his every word in their Patagonia jackets and muck boots, and when Maggie was in a more suitable frame of mind, behaving herself like a good little wife, she was terribly proud of him.

  Hunger churned in her belly and she felt herself weaving on her feet. She imagined dropping to her knees and pulling out the grass. She felt on a very precarious edge. She stood there, letting the feeling wash over her, taking comfort in her control over it, indulging, for a precious moment, in its vicious clarity.

  9

  Teddy Squire played cards. Poker. He had told Willa he
was good at it. This one night he took her to the Men’s Club in Lenox to show her how good he was. It was early in the semester and she didn’t know him very well, but she had a feeling when she was with him, like she could trust him. He seemed different than the other boys; he didn’t care what anyone thought.

  The Men’s Club was in a rambling, clapboard house down a long dirt drive overgrown with trees, and Teddy told her you could get whiskey for seventy-five cents a glass and they didn’t card you. There were cars parked here and there and a small yellow light over the door, twitching with moths. He rode her there on his bicycle, letting her have the seat while he pedaled standing up. It was an old three-speed bike, with wobbly tires, and he was sweating in his leather jacket. The jacket had been his grandfather’s and it had been worn in many different plays by various actors including a modern version of Othello and before that it had been worn by fighter pilots in World War II. The jacket looked good on him, she thought, it made him look tough. Teddy and his mother had moved back to Stockbridge that summer, into the grandfather’s house—he had described their journey as a pilgrimage of debauchery, driving across the country from one seedy bar to another, like a game of connect-the-dots. Willa had seen his mother once from the school bus window, standing at the end of the driveway in her nightgown, an alpaca shawl around her shoulders, her long yellow hair spilling in all directions. When Teddy had stepped onto the bus, she’d raised her hand in a solemn wave. He’d told Willa that he didn’t know his father. His mother didn’t like talking about it. It was something they had in common, the mystery of their roots.