Changes of Heart

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  And then, the night Faith turned forty-five, Henry broke his long-standing rule of abstinence and took his wife to bed. With her hair gone prematurely white, Faith had been feeling rather less than beautiful that year. And Henry, believing Faith’s childbearing years were behind her, thought such an exercise would provide her with a renewed sense of femininity. It most definitely did. Nine months later, Jane Millicent Penrod was born.

  From the beginning, Jane Millicent was different.

  “She slept right through the night,” Faith told Henry when she was still recovering in the hospital. “Not like the other children who screamed bloody murder every three hours. She hardly ever cries.”

  “What a smile she has, Mother,” Victoria crooned, leaning over the crib. “Angelic almost.”

  Sweet-natured, quiet, and dreamy, Jane Millicent didn’t walk at six months the way Willard had. She didn’t talk at nine months the way Cynthia had. She took her time, crawling slowly across the well-worn Persian carpet, making her way carefully through the many pairs of strong, lean legs around her. Jane’s legs were pudgy and not particularly well-coordinated. When she still wasn’t walking on her first birthday, Faith worriedly sought the advice of her pediatrician. “She’s a perfectly normal child, Faith,” he had told her.

  “But my other children all…”

  “Jane’s not your other children,” he interrupted. He already sensed something in the round-eyed little baby that set her apart from the other rambunctious Penrods. Her greenish-gray gaze—not at all unlike the color of the sea before a summer storm—watched him so intently. It was true that she was not developing physically as quickly as her older siblings, but the look she gave him was far beyond her years. Her red hair was finally coming in; it floated around her head, a gossamer cloud. “Jane is … just Jane,” he added lamely, smiling down at the baby. “Let her do things her way.”

  As the years went on, the Penrod family gradually came to terms with the fact that Jane Millicent was different. She did do things her way. The general consensus, however, was that her way wasn’t nearly as good as theirs.

  “For heaven’s sake, Jane!” Faith exploded, watching her youngest daughter gaze out the front picture window when she was specifically instructed to study her Latin, a subject she was (to her father’s enormous chagrin) failing. Her plump hand rested on the top of the closed primer. “You have to concentrate.”

  “Yes, yes, I know, Mother,” Jane responded, hurriedly opening the hated book. “I was just trying to see if I could memorize the declensions through osmosis.”

  “Through what?” Faith demanded, her voice—as was so often the case when addressing Jane—strident with irritation.

  “You know, this thing we’re learning about in biology,” Jane started to explain. But biology was another of her bad subjects, and she sensed that she was not going to be able to convince her mother that she had actually been studying. “It’s when the, uh, well, it’s the process of absorption, you see. And I was thinking that if maybe I could create a kind of osmotic flow from the text through my fingers to…”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Jane Millicent!” Faith exploded, though she had told herself just two days before that yelling was not going to help her youngest child. “Sit there and concentrate and work on that Latin. Your father wants to quiz you later.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Jane mumbled, fighting back tears. They both knew Henry wanted to do no such thing. He hated having to hear Jane’s faltering translations of his beloved Cicero. He could not, both mother and daughter knew, understand how any daughter of his could be so inept at his most cherished subject.

  “Are you crying?” Faith asked, far more gently, taking a few steps toward the couch where Jane was sitting. Oh, what a sight the girl was! Faith thought, her heart aching. When she was fifteen, Victoria had been so blond and slim and light-footed that Faith had had hopes for her as a great ballerina. Cynthia, even taller, had modeled briefly for a prestigious firm in Boston before giving it up as “just too tacky.”

  Faith was inordinately proud of her first two daughters. When Victoria had married the scion of one of New England’s leading political families (with talk of an uncle heading to the White House), Faith had thought it merely Victoria’s due. Cynthia, now in Paris doing postgraduate work in medicine at the Sorbonne, was dating three highly eligible Frenchmen. But then the only problem Cynthia, like her sister before her, had ever had when it came to men was deciding which one to choose.

  And Jane Millicent, poor fat Jane, less than a week away from her junior prom, had not once been asked out on a date. When she was a pudgy baby, everyone had called Jane “butterball.” But as she grew older and bigger, as it became more and more obvious that she wasn’t going to be an athletic or intellectual star like her siblings, her family stopped commenting on her looks. Though hilariously cutting and sarcastic among themselves, the older Penrod children didn’t criticize lesser beings, a category their sister had fallen into after she stopped being a cute little baby and had become merely a chubby, rather shy, growing girl.

  “I asked you something, Jane,” Faith went on, laying her hand on the back of the couch where Jane sat hunched over her Latin. Faith was tempted to lay her hand on Jane’s curly red hair, but something made her hesitate. The same thing that always did—a mixture of guilt for having failed with Jane and anger with Jane for allowing herself, at least by Penrod standards, to fail. “Are you crying?”

  Of course I am, Jane wanted to scream, why else am I sniveling back these tears?

  “No, Mother,” Jane said, taking a deep, ragged breath, “I think I might be getting a cold. I haven’t been feeling well the last day or two.”

  “Oh, dear,” Faith had replied, and then she had seized, just as Jane had hoped she would, on the solution to the sticky problem that lay ahead. “If you’re not better by Saturday night, Jane, I’m afraid I won’t be able to let you go to the dance.”

  So, although everyone who cared knew otherwise, Jane Penrod was unable to attend her junior prom because of a sudden, nasty head cold. Another malady—this time the flu—kept her home the night of the senior prom. But by then, Jane’s seemingly endless aptitude for failure no longer bothered her. She had succeeded in the one thing that really mattered: the Rhode Island School of Design had accepted her in their program.

  “With a full scholarship, Daddy!” Jane cried, the afternoon she received the letter of congratulations. “That means they must think my work is good—really good.”

  “It’s absurd to accept the scholarship, Jane Millicent,” Henry had answered rather stiffly. Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Smith had all—with regrets at the loss of potential Penrod capital—turned Jane down. Swarthmore’s rejection had come in the same mail as RISD’s acceptance, and Henry simply couldn’t understand his youngest daughter’s enthusiasm for an institution that was hardly even a poor relation to the Seven Sisters. “We can certainly afford to pay your way.”

  “But that’s not…” Jane started to say when Henry turned his attention back to the new issue of The New York Review of Books, “… the point,” she finished in a whisper. But when had anyone in the entire Penrod family, Jane demanded silently, understood that other people saw in Jane something her own family couldn’t? She was an artist.

  Drawing was the one thing she had always been good at. When other kids were constructing smudgy stick figures, Jane was capturing the form and flow of a galloping horse with a few graceful strokes of charcoal. She had an innate sense of perspective and design. Her knack for caricature—the sketches of her more interesting-looking teachers, for instance—frequently got her into trouble. As she grew older and began to realize her limitations as a Penrod, she spent more and more time broadening her horizons as an artist.

  She put together a makeshift studio in a back corner of the attic. The cool white plaster walls caught the full force of the afternoon sun, the deep reds staining Jane’s arms and brush as she painted another still life
of seashells, pine cones, or a bouquet of her favorite roses—a peach-colored hybrid from her mother’s garden. At night when the house creaked with wind and she couldn’t sleep, she’d carry a lantern up to her hideaway and attach it to one of the old iron hooks that still hung from the slanting rafters. By kerosene light she painted dark self-portraits of a round-faced, redheaded girl-woman with sad, dark eyes.

  Yes, she was good. Very good. Her art teachers would write gushing notes home on her report cards, acclaiming Jane Millicent’s talent and encouraging her parents to further their youngest daughter’s skills.

  “This ass Philby wants us to send Janie to some kind of special course for portrait painting this summer in Boston,” Henry complained at one such attempt. “Imagine! She already knows how to draw, dammit! What she needs is some extra help in the things that really matter. Math, for instance. Physics. Biology.”

  So Janie learned early on that what the rest of the world thought she was so good at meant next to nothing in the Penrod family. She couldn’t please Henry. She made Faith uncomfortable. She barely existed for her older siblings who had all now left Baldwin and were launched on various, prestigious careers. And though Jane loved Henry and Faith, she realized they would never really be able to love her. They couldn’t see Jane for what she was … only for what she wasn’t. It was not at all difficult for her to remain adamant—despite both parents’ protestations—about her decision to attend RISD.

  “You’re always welcome to come home, dear,” Henry told her as they waited for the train that scorching hot late August afternoon, “if you find it’s not what you had hoped. You could try to transfer to Wellesley or Smith at midterm, you know. It’s easier to get in then, I hear.”

  “I know, Daddy,” she answered, brushing her lips against his cheek. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  “Now be good, Jane,” Faith told her, squeezing her daughter’s flabby upper arm. Jane had insisted on letting her hair go free that day, and it tumbled around her shoulders, a strawberry-colored froth. She wore faded light blue overalls that did little to hide her bulk, and a pair of what looked to Faith like army boots over red-and-white striped socks. Once again, Faith was ashamed of herself for feeling so little warmth and understanding for Jane. Her youngest daughter was leaving home, and Faith sensed only relief. And Jane Millicent?

  Who knows what I might become now? she asked herself solemnly as the train moved smoothly on. Or what I can do? she thought as Faith and Henry, waving from the platform, grew smaller and disappeared around a curve. “Or where I will go?” she murmured as the familiar town flew by in a blur.

  Chapter 3

  If Michael Delaney had not decided to get drunk the night that his former employer Trent, Mercedes, Freemon, and Philby announced their incipient merger with the British conglomerate Sanders & Simpson, Dorn & Delaney might never have been born. It just so happened that Zachary Dorn, who didn’t drink but who had a similar urge to obliterate his current reality, had stationed himself at the same midtown watering hole as Michael that night. Zachary, a vice president of finance at Trent, had spent the last three months helping to negotiate the deal with S&S. And though his work on the merger had already garnered him high praise from his new British masters (“You’re a tough sod, Dorn, our sort of bloke”), it had not made him particularly happy.

  “I’ll have another one of these,” Michael told the bartender, pushing an empty glass across the mahogany counter. Zachary, who was sitting at his favorite observation post at the foot of the bar, turned his attention to the well-dressed, prematurely balding man who was so obviously trying to get inebriated. He looked vaguely familiar to Zach.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the bartender replied, wiping down the bar, “but I’ve just come on. What are you drinking?”

  “Not sure,” Michael answered glumly, staring into the empty glass. “It was clear. And had an olive in it.”

  “Well, I…”

  “A double vodka,” Zach interrupted, coming to the bartender’s aid. Zach had a computerlike memory, good for simple situations like this one, not so great when there were things better left forgotten.

  “Thank you, Zach,” the bartender said, smiling across at him. “Can I freshen up Shirley for you?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Zach answered, pushing his watery ginger ale forward. Michael stared at the bartender and then at Zach, a question starting to form in his bleary gaze.

  “A Shirley Temple,” Zach explained, holding up his glass. “My preferred poison.”

  “How’d you know what I was drinking?” Michael demanded. Though Michael was usually soft-spoken and articulate, the vodka was putting a nasty, combative spin on his thoughts and comments. He stared suspiciously at Zach. “Don’t I know you?”

  “I work at Trent, soon to be Sanders,” Zach replied. “They’re just down the block from—”

  “You too?” Michael cried, his face softening, saddening. “Et tu? Lord, can you believe it? I invested ten years of my life in that place. I built up my department from scratch, from nothing. I have some of the best, the most wonderful people working under me. What am I going to tell them? Sorry, kids, the money men sold us down the river. Better start jumping ship before you’re pushed. God,” Michael added, gulping the vodka as if it were water, “I hate this.”

  “What makes you think you’ll have to let people go?” Zachary asked. “My understanding is that the New York office won’t be affected by the merger much at all.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Michael retorted. “What cloud are you living on? I’ve already received a blue memo suggesting that I cut any unnecessary staff.” Blue memos were generated from the top, which now meant Sanders. The news confirmed Zach’s worst fears. In the heat of the negotiations—a process that heightened his senses and spurred his heart as few other things in life could—he had allowed himself to believe all the assurances the predator so often offers the prey. In a deep unexplored part of himself, he had known the beautifully tailored, immaculately mannered Sanders people had been lying through their well-capped teeth. Michael’s news nevertheless hit him hard. He had been a Benedict Arnold, betraying his company to the Brits.

  “I … didn’t know,” he replied weakly.

  “And I got off easy,” Michael went on. “I heard that the media department was told to come up with a plan to cut back staff by half. Can you believe it? All that bull we were handed about how mutually beneficial this would be to Trent! It’s just the same old merge and purge routine. God, I hate those financial bastards! Yo,” Michael cried at the bartender, tapping his glass, “another one of these things.”

  “What department are you in?” Zach asked uneasily.

  “Creative,” Michael answered. There was pride in his voice, even as he made the simple announcement. Zach felt sick. “Michael Delaney. I’m one of the creative directors. Or was.”

  They sat in silence for a second as Michael sipped his drink. Then he asked the inevitable question, “And you?”

  What else could he say?

  “I’m Zachary Dorn,” he replied, holding out his hand. “I’m one of the financial bastards. And I’m sorry as hell.”

  If Michael Delaney had been used to drinking, things might have turned out differently. But apart from a glass of wine when he went out to dinner with his wife and champagne on New Year’s, he rarely touched alcohol. Zach’s news hit about the same moment as his last double vodka, and the two combined to send his world spinning wildly out of control. He lurched out of his seat.

  “You … son of a bitch,” he muttered, clutching the back of Zach’s stool for support. “You rotten, rotten…”

  “Where do you live, Michael?” Zach asked, getting out of his chair and silently signaling the bartender for both checks. “Let me give you a hand.”

  “Don’t want any help,” Michael replied, grasping Zach’s arm as if it were a lifesaver, “from any bastard.”

  “Right, I understand,” Zach answered. “I just want
to know where you live.”

  “Uh…” Michael breathed deeply, swaying against Zach, “En … en … Englewood Cliffs.”

  Zach was able to snag a taxi on Madison and—after a certain amount of cash crossed from back seat to front—managed to get them heading north up the Henry Hudson Parkway. By the time they reached the George Washington Bridge, Michael came to enough to remember his street address.

  Zach had to help him up his boxwood-hedged drive and thrust him into the arms of his shocked but obviously relieved wife, Anne.

  “What in the world happened to him?” she demanded. She was slight, dark-haired, with an angelic, heart-shaped face that even when deeply worried seemed aglow with hidden light. Behind her, seated at the kitchen table, were three little girls, pint-sized adaptations of their mother.

  “He … heard some bad news today,” Zach answered awkwardly.

  “The Sanders thing. I know, he called me from the office,” Anne said, holding Michael to her. “God, he reeks of alcohol! What have you two been doing? Oh, and please…?” She looked up at him questioningly.

  “Zachary Dorn,” he said. “Zach.”

  “Please, Zach, come in.”

  She got Michael and the girls to bed and forced a dinner not made for Zach down his throat. He did his best to explain what had happened, and what his role had been in the takeover, but Anne didn’t seem to give much credence to his conviction that he was at fault.

  “You did your job, as far as I’m concerned,” she told him, pouring them both coffee. “It wasn’t your idea, right? It was just your assignment.”

  “Anne, thousands of Nazis used the same argument,” Zach replied grimly.

  “Oh, please.” She laughed, and Zach had a difficult time believing she wasn’t a high school cheerleader, one of those lithe and limber girls who can jump ten feet and do backward somersaults. “So dramatic! Do you always feel this responsible for everything? Make it a custom, do you, seeing intoxicated strangers home?”