Crossroads

by Belva Plain

  He seemed to realize the sense of that. She saw him gather his thoughts for a second, then he plunged in. “Mrs. Wright has had her own share of troubles. Life hasn’t been as easy for her as everyone thinks. Her first husband died in a car accident—”

  “Yes, I know about that!” Now that he’d started to spill his secret, Jewel wanted to hurry him along. “He was on a business trip in New Orleans. Checking on a glassworks outlet down there.”

  “It wasn’t like that, not quite.” Al paused. “The truth was, that man was no good. Most people didn’t know it, because he was so friendly and likeable and he was on the boards of so many charities and all . . . but some of us who saw him up close . . .we had his number.” He paused again. Would he never get on with it? Jewel bit her tongue. “Do you remember what he looked like?” he asked.

  Jewel tried to dredge up an image in her mind and failed. “I was only four when he died,” she said.

  “He had red hair. Not bright red, kind of dark. Like Gwen’s.”

  It took Jewel a moment to grasp his meaning, then: Oh, my god! she thought, as icy prickles ran up and down her spine.

  “Are you saying . . . ?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know for sure. But all the servants in the house knew that man cheated on Mrs. Wright. He had been doing it for years. And the outlet in New Orleans was his idea and it never made any money. . . .”

  “So if he did have a mistress down there . . .” Jewel’s mind was reeling. “Did Mrs. Wright know her husband was running around on her?”

  “I’m sure she suspected it, but I don’t think she would have stayed married to him if she’d known for a fact.”

  “So she found out about the baby after his death.”

  “And she took it in. Her husband’s illegitimate child.”

  “And she never told anyone.”

  “Just Gwen’s nursemaid Mavis, and Mavis told me in strictest confidence. Mrs. Wright wanted to protect Gwen from the humiliation—”

  “She wanted to protect herself!” Jewel said. And it was astonishing how much she liked the idea of proud, regal Cassandra Wright forced to confide in the hired help and lie to the rest of the world.

  “If she had really wanted to protect herself, she would have left Gwen with no one to care for her,” Albert said hotly. “But taking her in was the right thing to do, and Mrs. Wright—”

  “Yes, yes. She’s a saint!” Jewel said, but her mind was racing. “Does Gwen know?” she asked Albert. “About her father?”

  “Of course not. I told you, Mrs. Wright protects her. And you can’t say a word about any of this. Like I said, I’m the only one Mavis told, and . . .”

  She gave him an injured look. “Albert, I’m not that kind of person.”

  He seemed reassured—but only a little. “I wouldn’t want anything to hurt Gwen.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You see, she’s a good kid. But she’s . . . well, she’s different. Yes, that’s it. Different.”

  * * *

  Different. The word kept repeating itself in Jewel’s head for the rest of the ride home. Yes, Gwen Wright is different. From me, anyway. She’s eighteen and I am twenty-two. Her mother was a tramp who slept with a married man, and mine was a decent woman who got married and took care of five kids until she was so worn out she died. Now the tramp’s daughter has everything a person could ever want, and I have to scrape by.

  So she was adopted. And there’s a nasty story about it. And it’s been kept from her so she doesn’t know where she came from or who she was. Tough. But no tougher than the way I had it after Ma died and a half a year later Pop found another wife and then scooted off as far as you can go without dropping into an ocean.

  Albert said Gwen’s different, but what he means is she’s special. So she shouldn’t have to face life like the rest of us do. Well, who the hell decided that?

  * * *

  “Duffy Street—is this the place?” Albert asked. Jewel had been so busy with her thoughts she hadn’t even noticed that they’d reached the city.

  “Yes, here. Stop in front of the delicatessen. I live over it, on the third floor.”

  “Then here you go.”

  “Thank you. Good night, Albert.”

  “Uh . . . Jewel . . . ?”

  “Mum’s the word, Albert. I promise.”

  “Well then, good night.”

  Chapter Three

  Jewel got out of the gardener’s car and watched as the last vestige of her visit to paradise drove off. Now you’re back in your world, Jewel, she told herself. Here it is in all its glory—two flights of rickety old stairs up to the third floor and the owners are too cheap to have brighter lights. Be careful not to stumble and break your leg. Now you’re in the apartment—so called—two rooms and a kitchenette—so called. Compare that with what you’ve just seen. The rugs like dark blue velvet, the fern plant in the cut-glass bowl on that little table. It looked like mahogany. It had to be mahogany, so dark and shining. . . . But now you’d better stop comparing, because if you don’t it’ll drive you crazy. Still, you will never forget the home where Gwen Wright lives, not until the day you die. You’ll think about it before you go to sleep at night, and you’ll daydream about it when you’re awake. You’ll dream about that house the way other women dream about finding their true love.

  There was a rocking chair in Jewel’s living room—so called—the one new piece of furniture she’d bought for herself. She sat in it now, closed her eyes, and tried to let the back-and-forth motion soothe her. But it didn’t work. Not tonight. She looked around her room in the darkness. She’d been so pleased with herself when she’d moved to Wrightstown; she’d been sure she was moving up in the world.

  Wrightstown had been built on a river, like so many New England towns. The township had been founded before the Wrights had established their world-famous glassworks—no one could remember what it had been called in those pre-glassworks days—but it was because of the glassworks that it had grown and remained vibrant while other small communities in the area had withered away. There were jobs to be had in Wrightsville, and because of that, other smaller businesses flourished there too. There were restaurants and movie theaters and a shiny new mall just a few miles away from the center of the thriving city. There were doctors and lawyers and dentists and teachers. There was even a theater that showed the occasional road show from New York as well as rock concerts and other special events. There were rich neighborhoods, full of gracious homes, that climbed up the hills that surrounded the city, and poorer neighborhoods with meager but tidy bungalows crowded near the railroad tracks. These were the homes that had been built for the employees of the glassworks a century earlier. Some of these old areas had fallen into disrepair in the seventies and the eighties and were now being rediscovered by smart young people who had graduated from college and were rehabilitating them. Wrightstown had its own college too.

  Jewel had not come from Wrightstown. Her home was farther up the river, a smaller, meaner little community that had surrounded a textile mill in the days when Americans still manufactured their own fabrics, yarns, and threads. Jewel’s father had come there from his family’s failing dairy farm, a smart, angry boy whose anger came from the fact that he was smart and had wanted to go to college but he hadn’t had the money. Instead he’d had to rely on his clever hands. The only work he’d been able to find in the dying textile town had been with a cabinetmaker. The shop where he worked was not a place that did the kind of custom work with fine wood that might have satisfied his soul. He built ugly, boxlike cabinets with cheap hardware to be sold to people whose kitchens and bathrooms were as drab as his own. He came home at night smelling of wood and sweat and machine oil. Jewel couldn’t remember seeing him without sawdust in his hair, not even on Sunday.

  Her mother had not been as smart as her father, but she had been a beauty. It was from her ma that Jewel had gotten her spectacular eyes, mouth, and hair. As a child, Jewel had watched her mother’s b
eauty disappear as lines brought on by stress and worry etched themselves on her lovely face, first between the eyes, then under them; then finally the lines became trenches along the sides of her mouth, pulling it down until the smile that had once been radiant was a grimace. It was money, or the lack of it, that had robbed Ma of her youth and her pretty smile. Money made all the difference—always.

  Jewel shifted in the rocker. A picture had come into her mind, one she didn’t want but she couldn’t push it away. It was just a snapshot of a moment that was over in a second—but it was one of those moments that can put a life on a certain course forever. It had happened at the end of the day, when her father had come home. As usual he was tired and out of sorts. Ma had served the dinner that had been cooked with an eye to a dwindling paycheck rather than taste and pleasure, and she had watched Pop’s bad temper mount. And Jewel had watched her. Ma had looked at the children gathered around her table—more mouths than they could feed—and then she looked again at Pop. And her eyes were full of the kind of exhaustion that reaches down into the bones. It was as if she was carrying some burden that was so heavy that she was going to sink under its weight. And Jewel, who was way too young to know anything about the ways of men and women, nevertheless understood it. Because Pop’s fatigue and bad temper had never interfered with his . . . well, Ma would have called them his needs. If anything, the urgency of them seemed to increase with his weariness—and his bad temper. And his needs meant more kids—nothing had ever interfered with that. Ma knew this was going to be another night of needs and as she looked at Pop and the children, she was beaten. Jewel jumped up to take the bowl out of her mother’s hands and started serving the potatoes herself. That was how it had begun. That was how Jewel became one of those girls for whom the carefree years of childhood are a myth because they have taken on the job of helping.

  Over the years, there was a lot of helping to be done, for, added to the usual household chores, there was always at least one person in the overcrowded little house who had some kind of physical ailment: a broken arm, or measles, or a bloody nose resulting from a boyish fistfight in somebody’s backyard.

  What Jewel remembered most was the ugliness of it all, the turmoil of clothing ready for the wash, of unmade beds and a cluttered kitchen where meals were eaten while everybody was in a hurry, going or coming and going again. Everyone in town seemed to have more money than Jewel’s family had. Their houses had nice curtains on the windows and their girls went to school wearing nice clothes. Jewel wanted to be well dressed and well groomed. She never was. Her hands were rough from washing and cleaning; her beautiful hair was cut bluntly with scissors at home. There was no time for a trip to a beauty shop, no money for a carefully styled coiffure or manicured nails tinted a shining pink.

  One bright day, when she was eighteen, Jewel went walking alone beyond the town. She kept on going until she reached the farm country where cornfields bordered the road on either side, and as the wind rushed, the cornstalks swung. Clouds overhead clove the blue. She had heard in school the words “lapis lazuli.” Was this it? And suddenly before her eyes, Jewel saw how the ocean must look as the sky arches over it. She saw enormous waves plunge through the vastness. Everything was alive. Everywhere and everything, from the ocean to the growing corn, to the birds that passed high overhead, all moving things going, going somewhere. Somewhere!

  * * *

  Jewel opened her eyes and stopped rocking. Now she was no longer eighteen, and she was going nowhere. Her life was empty and she had no idea how to fill it. Of course a man would be a solution, and she’d met quite a few attractive men who were attracted to her. But she hadn’t loved any of them. Because the men who came her way were in the same predicament she was: working hard and not having enough to show for it. And she wasn’t going to risk winding up like Ma.

  She got up to pull down the shade. The rain and wind were bending back a scrawny tree that was just beyond her window. Beyond the tree was the endless dark. She turned away from the window; she was going to bed. One way to get rid of the pictures in her mind was to sleep.

  * * *

  Sleep was coming slowly. Too slowly. Jewel twisted and turned in the bed sheets, kicking them off and pulling them back. This didn’t happen to her often—thank heaven—but tonight the pictures were stronger than her will; they kept on coming. Now she was back to that wonderful house and that nobody of a girl who didn’t seem to belong there. Then she was in the car with Albert and he was telling her about Cassandra Wright’s great secret. The secret from which Gwen Wright had been so carefully, lovingly protected. Protected as Jewel had never been. A thought joined the pictures racketing around in Jewel’s brain. I wonder what would happen if Gwen were to find out. She tried to push the thought aside, but like the pictures it just kept coming back.

  Chapter Four

  The morning after the rainstorm dawned, as such mornings usually do, clear and achingly beautiful. But that was not the reason why Gwen awoke and knew she couldn’t stay inside. The encounter with the girl who worked at the glassworks had upset her . . . only upset wasn’t the right word. What Jewel had done—that was her name, Jewel—was send Gwen back to a place she had thought she’d left behind. It was a gray place, full of foggy emotions, which could engulf her if she wasn’t careful.

  When Jewel Fairchild had appeared in the library, Gwen had to keep herself from gasping. She’s so beautiful! Gwen had thought. Like a tropical flower, with that white skin and those blue eyes and that red, perfect mouth—I can see how red it is through her lipstick. Even her teeth are bright when she smiles, and her smile is delightful. And a stab of an emotion Gwen recognized as her old nemesis, envy, had shot through her. And once again she rembered the day she’d turned five.

  * * *

  Gwen jumped up, went to her closet, and reached for her clothes. She was not going to think about her fifth birthday, not today, she told herself. But after a moment it was clear that blotting it out was going to be easier said than done. It was a part of her personality—maybe it was a curse—that things that had happened long ago stayed as fresh with her as if they had happened in the last five minutes. This was especially true with incidents from her childhood. And that fifth birthday still seemed to encompass everything Gwen had been as a child—all her doubts and angers.

  She had known that her party was not going to be an elaborate affair; her guests were all from the public school that her mother insisted she attend and Cassandra would never have had the bad taste to outshine the other children’s parties. Besides, she didn’t believe in conspicuous displays. There would be no pony rides or hired clowns to help celebrate Gwen’s fifth year and Gwen didn’t expect them. However, she had expected that on her special day she would be the best-looking girl in the room. She was relying on her new dress to accomplish this feat for her—from an early age she had known she was not pretty. But her party dress was more than pretty; in Gwen’s young eyes it was nothing short of magnificent. She had chosen it herself on a trip to Wrightstown’s most expensive department store. She’d been attracted by the magic of the fabric—an iridescent silvery taffeta that shimmered with different undertones as the light caught the folds of the skirt; now they were blue, now they were green, and every once in a while there was a glint of red. The dress itself was plain in design, with small puffed sleeves tied with black velvet ribbon and a simple heart-shaped neckline; there were no ruffled frills, no lacy trim, nothing to distract from the material. Gwen had known instantly that she wanted it, but as usual, she hadn’t trusted her instincts, and so she had pointed it out tentatively to her mother. To her enormous relief, Cassandra had appreciated it as much as she did. In fact, she’d seemed extremely pleased—to say nothing of surprised—with Gwen’s choice. “It’s perfect,” she’d said. “How clever of you to have seen it among all those poufy dresses.”

  Swelling with pride, Gwen had watched as the precious garment was paid for, and packed in a box with the department store’s name on the lid. She
had carried it home in the car on her lap. And on the day of the party she had put it on confidently, knowing that she would be prettier than all the other girls.

  There are times in our lives when the vision in our mind of how an event should unfold is so strong that it blocks us from seeing what is happening in reality. That was why Gwen didn’t realize that her dress was not working the hoped-for miracle. True, none of the other little girls had mentioned it—as it always is with females, be they five or fifty, it was the other girls she wanted most to impress—but she had faith that given time and opportunity they would. Meanwhile she was being shunted more and more to the outskirts of her own party as the other, more sociable children congregated in the center of the living room. It was at that moment that a latecomer named Carol Anne Jenkins had walked in.

  By the age of five, most children know who among them will be the winners in the battle for attention and popularity, and who will be the losers. Every one of Gwen’s little classmates knew that Carol Anne was a winner. Not only did she have blond hair that fell naturally into long shiny curls, and large blue eyes, she took tap lessons and had once been asked to entertain at a variety show given by the Rotary Club. Adults loved her, and through sheer personal charisma she managed to be popular with her peers in spite of it.

  Carol Anne was wearing a pink tulle dress. “Mama made it for me,” she announced proudly. “And the petticoats too.”There were three of them pushing up the skirt—liberally trimmed with ruffles—until it stood out from her waist at almost a forty-five-degree angle. Fake pink roses tied with pink satin bows were buried in and among the tiers of ruffles; more roses, ribbon, and white lace edged the bodice of the dress and the sleeves.

  Years later Gwen would realize that the fabric was a slick synthetic and Carol’s mother sewed for her because the family couldn’t afford to buy ready-made, but at that moment at her birthday party, Gwen only knew that Carol Anne Jenkins had stolen her day. If Gwen had been asked what she was feeling she would have said, “I’m not enough.” And she hated feeling that. In mounting anger, she watched as the other girls flocked around the thief gushing over the roses and the ruffles. Finally Gwen couldn’t stand it anymore. She inched her way through the admiring throng until she was at Carol Anne’s side, then as Carol Anne accepted compliments—compliments that should by rights have gone to the birthday girl—meek and mild little Gwen Wright reached out and yanked one of the golden curls as hard as she could.