Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  In all our happy years together, I had never managed to summon the courage to tell him I had given away my child. As time went by, as people I knew became parents and I got to know their children, what I had done, the way I had gone against my own conscience, seemed even more shameful. I saw women artists who were raising children and continuing to paint. I knew single mothers managing to have good lives with their kids despite everything. An acquaintance of mine had not one but two children when she was in her teens; she managed an uptown gallery, worked on her sculptures when she could, and was devoted to her two adorable boys.

  That gap between Patrick and me, that failure of confidence, was a constant anxiety, and I never gave up trying to find an opening, a way to reassure myself that he could know this about me and still love me. One night we were in the back room at Fanelli’s having one of those tipsy bar discussions about love: What does love really mean, what are its limits? I asked him, “What if I did something wrong, Patrick? Something terrible?”

  He just smiled at me. “But you wouldn’t. I know you, Wynn. I know exactly what you’re capable of.”

  “But let’s just say I did. Would you still love me?”

  His smile disappeared, and he got that same wary look in his eyes that I remembered. “The idea is ridiculous.”

  “But what if, Patrick? It’s just a theoretical question.”

  He said nothing. His whole face closed up. His golden eyes narrowed with impatience. He must have known that all I needed was an assurance that he would love me, no matter what; it was only a drunken conversation, it meant nothing, we’d both forget it in the morning.

  And yet he wouldn’t say it, because it wasn’t true.

  Now everything was immeasurably more horrible. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone. And, I thought, why should I confide in anyone? What right did I have to seek comfort? I couldn’t even cry. If I had cried, I would have hated myself even more—crying was so cheap—but I couldn’t have cried if I’d wanted to. I was a stone.

  For a long time I couldn’t do anything. I hadn’t slept much the previous night, and I remember that I woke that Monday to a gray, rainy day. Across the vast room was the painting I had been working on, a drab semi-abstract still life of a pile of books on the windowsill. The sight of it sickened me. I gave away a child so I could paint, I thought. A child died because I wanted to be a painter. I thought of my mother, and my thoughts weren’t forgiving: I wished she were still alive, so she could see what she had done. I imagined calling her on the phone, screaming at her about this child on the news, confronting her with the nightmare of it, letting out some of the rancor that had lived in me for nine years.

  I was in agony—literally: my stomach hurt, my head pounded, my chest was tight. I thought seriously about killing myself, and I despised myself because I couldn’t do it. There is my wretched painting on the easel, and somewhere my child is lying dead.

  I was in bed when Patrick came home. I told him my head was splitting, I thought I was coming down with something. He was very quiet, very kind. I lay still, breathing evenly, while he fixed himself some food, read a newspaper, and then finally got into bed beside me. He fell asleep immediately, as he nearly always did, and once he was safely asleep I went over to the window and sat staring out at the bleakness of Lafayette Street in the dark.

  It was still raining. I remember the sepia look of the street that night, the way it gleamed gold where the light fell on it. I watched a man walking slowly, staggering from time to time, to the corner of Houston, where, as he turned toward Mulberry Street, he fell. I saw him fall, watched him lie there in the rain, did nothing—just watched. I hated the world, and I hated myself with an intensity I didn’t know I was capable of. I hated my own existence. I hated the parents who had inflicted it on me. I even hated Patrick for his innocence, his implacable goodness in the face of the evil in the world. I sat there cold and dry-eyed, hunched in a chair, full of loathing and shame and horror, until, toward dawn, I fell asleep.

  Patrick awoke soon after and was sympathetic to what he assumed was the flu coming on. But he had slept later than usual and was in a rush to get to work. I could barely speak, and though I wanted nothing more than to lie in his arms and let him comfort me, I had to force myself just to kiss him good-bye, feeling that he debased himself by touching me, and that I in some strange way made myself even more loathsome by allowing it. When he left I went back to the window and sat there all day looking out at the street.

  I can see now, so many years later, that I was in shock, the way certain kinds of crime victims become numbed and zombielike afterward. It’s a clinical condition. It can be identified and treated. There are books about it, articles. If this had happened today, I could take a taxi to a crisis center of some kind, tell my story, and be helped. At that time I knew none of this, I knew nothing, and I wouldn’t have helped myself if I could. I wanted to die. Failing that, I wanted to be like a dead person.

  For days, I went on like that, letting Patrick blame my silence and remoteness on the stubborn headache, a vague flulike malaise. I tried to act normal. I cooked dinner for us and attempted to eat. I brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes. Sex wasn’t an issue; I didn’t feel well enough. Patrick was working on a sculpture in his corner of the loft—slabs of wood combined with random metal objects, one of the pieces he was going to have cast; it was at a crucial point, and he was completely absorbed. I tried only to stay out of his way. I spent my time walking, sitting in cafés, strapping my easel to my back so Patrick would think I was going out to paint.

  The murder, with its hellish details, was an important story, dominating the news for days. At that time, reports of child abuse were uncommon. When the news magazines came out that week, I bought them all, and saw more photographs, took in more details of Molly McCormick’s life and death. Everything I read confirmed what I already knew. There was a color photograph of her when she was about three, wearing red pajamas, sitting on the floor beside the Christmas tree. I knew that somewhere, in a box of old junk, was a photograph of myself at that age, in red pajamas at Christmastime, and when Patrick was out one afternoon I searched until I found it, and compared the two. We could have been twins. The pale blue eyes, the masses of hair, the general shape of our faces. I stared at those photographs, went over them with a magnifying glass. There was no escaping it. Our noses were different, our jawlines; her face was thinner; and she had her sad, desperate smile. But everything else was eerily similar.

  One night when I came home, Patrick had turned on the news. Molly McCormick’s funeral was being shown. Unable not to watch, I sat down beside him. There was a weeping aunt, a priest, a little playmate looking bewildered. The social worker who had handled the adoption was interviewed. Patrick said, “You have to wonder what this kid’s real parents would be feeling if they were watching this.” His mouth was twisted with anger. On the television screen, the casket was being lowered into the earth in some Kansas City cemetery. “It’s bad enough to give up your kid—I honestly don’t understand how anyone could do that. But then to just turn your back, refuse to take responsibility, let whatever happens happen—that’s a mystery to me.”

  “I think sometimes—” My voice came out in a whisper, and I cleared my throat. “Sometimes it must seem like the best decision. To give a child up and then to bow out.”

  “People can convince themselves of anything,” he said. “When I hear about something like this, I—” He broke off. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to talk about it.” He went to the refrigerator to get a beer.

  I cut out, carefully, all the pictures of Molly McCormick. I put them into an envelope and hid them between the pages of my sketchbook, taking them out obsessively to look at them. I couldn’t keep away from those pictures for more than an hour or two. Sitting in cafés, I pulled them out and stared into Molly McCormick’s blue eyes, thinking of my careless, privileged life—my own untroubled childhood, the drunken evening with Mark Erling, my years of
happiness with Patrick while that child was being beaten and tortured, my lame, failed, boring paintings.

  Patrick kept asking me if I was okay.

  “Yes, I’m okay.” I forced myself to smile. “Just female stuff, plus a small artistic crisis.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not yet. Right now I need to think.”

  Absorbed in his work, he accepted that.

  When I made my weekly call to my father in Florida, we chatted about his perennial border, what was thriving, what needed replacing. We exchanged comments on the weather. He brought me up to date on his arthritis pains and the medication he was taking for his sinuses. He didn’t mention the Molly McCormick story. I half wanted to confront him with it, to inform him we were no better than murderers, he and my mother and I. I wanted to ask him some of the questions that were seething in my brain. Was it because she had lost two sons? Was that why she wanted me to lose a child? Or was she punishing me somehow for surviving when my two brothers had not? Or was she simply evil, cold, hateful?

  I imagined my father’s cowardly mumbles, his automatic defense of my mother, the phone slammed down in denial. And, of course, I said nothing. In the end, I was relieved that my father hadn’t realized the truth. My shame was my own. No one knew what I had done, that I had in effect killed my own child. I had thought of her as my lost daughter. Now she was more than lost: She was dead.

  I called in sick to work. I roamed the streets, and whenever I saw children playing, children walking hand in hand with their parents, I could hardly keep from sitting down and crying—if I could have cried. I walked until I was exhausted, returning compulsively to my grandmother’s building on Cornelia Street. I wanted her back: She was the only one I wanted to confess to. I stood in front of her building and was filled with a longing that was almost unbearable, wishing I were six years old and could curl up beside her on the scratchy brown horsehair sofa while she told me about her boss, Mr. Sax, at the tailor shop and the basil she used to grow in Italy and how she fell in love with my grandfather in Maine because he was tall and handsome—like a Yankee Rudolph Valentino.

  Eventually, I had to go home, where I would sit by the window looking out, folding and unfolding the pictures of Molly McCormick and trying to avoid Patrick. I didn’t know what to do.

  And then, suddenly, I knew what to do.

  More than a week had gone by since I’d first seen the Molly McCormick story on television. It was the next Tuesday morning. I had been awake since dawn. I stayed in bed while Patrick hauled himself out, showered, ate breakfast. Before he left, he came over and kissed me gently on the cheek. I didn’t stir. Then I heard him go out the door, lock it, and open the outer metal door to the stairwell. It slammed behind him. I sat up in bed and called, “Patrick!” He didn’t hear me, of course. I didn’t mean for him to hear me. I was saying good-bye.

  I had received a letter from my old friend Rachel Lucas. After graduation, she had gone home to London to teach art at a school for disturbed children. Rachel had written:

  I’m sorry to hear your painting isn’t going well, though you seem to be weathering it cheerfully enough. You’ll get it figured out—if it’s any help, I have faith in you. And I know you’re firmly entrenched in New York with Patrick. But if you weren’t, I’d tell you to come over and apply for this job that just came vacant here. The last teacher quit after six months—we do go through teachers quickly, chew them up and spit them out. But I’ve been here more than three years now—incredible!—and I think you would like the place, too. I know you’d love living in London. For me, it’s been a great inspiration. It might do the same for you. Maybe you just need a change. I know this is hopeless, and believe me I’m not trying to talk you into something you don’t want to do, but—who knows? I thought I’d mention it.

  It came to me suddenly that I had to give up painting, and I had to give up Patrick, and I had to leave New York. I couldn’t allow myself to have the things that made me happy. I found paper and wrote a note. I didn’t think about what to say, just scribbled it: I’m leaving you because I have to. Please don’t ask me why. I left money with it; the rent was coming up, and the Con Edison bill. Then, quickly, I packed: some clothes, the photographs of Molly McCormick, my sketch-books, a few personal things. I debated whether or not to keep the few photographs of Patrick that I had, sketches I had made of him. In the end, I put them into the Dumpster behind our building, but I kept everything he had ever given me: the turquoise beads, a tiny stuffed cat, a leather belt, a sweater I loved. I knew I had to keep those things, whether I deserved them or not.

  I took my portable easel out to the street and left it outside a studio on Spring Street that held life-drawing classes: some struggling artist would find it and give it a good home. I packed my leftover clothes, shoes, books into bags and lugged them to the Goodwill store. Then I went to the bank for travelers’ checks and took a taxi to La Guardia, to the British Airways terminal. I bought a ticket for the next available flight; it left in four hours. It was only then that I placed a phone call to Rachel in London. She had just come in. I asked her if the teaching job was still available, and could she get me an interview. I didn’t care if she could or not. I would go anyway. The connection was very bad, but she said she’d be thrilled to see me, I could stay with her as long as necessary, and she told me how to get to her place from Heathrow.

  Then I called my father and explained that Patrick and I had broken up, I was upset, I was pretty sure Rachel could get me this job in London, things had happened very quickly—that was all I said. He was sad about my being so far away, but didn’t ask many questions, and he didn’t sound particularly surprised. I suppose it seemed natural to him that things wouldn’t last, that people he was fond of would disappear from his life.

  I sat in a plastic chair with a stack of magazines that I read through systematically. I couldn’t let myself think, couldn’t let myself imagine Patrick arriving home to find me gone. I read fashion magazines, recipes, articles about the stock market, movie reviews. Then my flight was called, and eight and a half hours later I was knocking on the door of Rachel’s flat.

  And all the time I could hear Patrick’s voice in my head: I’m getting used to happiness. What would I do if it was taken away?

  • • •

  The pay at St. Clement’s wasn’t great, and I lived austerely in London. I found a bed-sitter in a run-down row house near Regent’s Park. It wasn’t far from the London Zoo, and I used to be awakened in the morning by the roaring of the lions. I liked London, but I never loved it as I had New York. And that was fitting. That was exactly the way I wanted things to be.

  The only kind of satisfaction I allowed myself was connected with my work, and that took a while. St. Clement’s was an amazing school, staffed by people who truly cared about the children—children who had never been loved, who had been removed from abusive homes and placed there. The school was privately funded, with a large endowment and an impressive list of prominent backers. It was well known as a place that, in the face of enormous odds, could produce remarkable results, and it was a blessing, a haven for the children fortunate enough to find their way there —desperate, angry, ancient children who had never had childhoods.

  I hadn’t known what I was getting into: I had simply fled the hell that New York had become. I thought St. Clement’s would be a refuge, but at first it was more like a pit where all my demons lay in wait. The children seemed like my enemies. They pulled at me, they pushed me away, they intruded on my life, they laughed at me and broke down in front of me and threatened me. I spent most of the time feeling completely inadequate, bewildered, half sick with a whole new set of anxieties. For the first month or so, I went home every night exhausted, too tired to think, too beaten down even to analyze how I felt about being there. I didn’t know if the place was making everything worse, if it depressed me or was healing me, if my decision had been a stroke of genius or the worst mistake of my life.

&nbs
p; Rachel told me she had wanted to quit almost constantly during her first couple of months. Once she had gone in hysterics to Mr. Munro, the headmaster, and resigned, but had let herself be talked back into her job. Within six months, she said, she was hooked. She couldn’t imagine quitting now. “Leave those kids?” she asked, and laughed. “At this point, I need them as much as they need me, Wynn. Maybe more.”

  Gradually, I began to see what she meant. I became used to the place, the way you get used to the frigid water in a lake that, when you first jumped into it, you were sure was going to kill you. The kids just get to you was what we all said—kids who would tear your heart out if they didn’t frighten you to death. A large minority of them were violent, some were suicidal, all were depressed, and with many of them, we failed. I witnessed anguish and fear at St. Clement’s that I will never forget. I saw a boy slash his wrist straight across, twice, three times, with a piece of glass from the window he broke, the blood spurting all over us as we tried to get to him. He held us off with the glass until he passed out from loss of blood. The ambulance arrived before he bled to death, but as soon as he was released from the hospital he tried it again, and that time he didn’t survive.

  That was probably the worst thing. That and the time a girl named Violet, one of my prize students, left the grounds, hitched a ride north on a frigid January day, and drowned herself in a half-frozen lake somewhere outside Manchester, her hometown. And there were other, less spectacular disasters—self-mutilations, petty cruelties, breakdowns and hysteria, occasional attacks on the teachers.

  And all that time, the memory of the fate of Molly McCormick ran through my mind like a dark river in which I feared I might drown.

  I had kept with me the pictures of her, and I still took them out from time to time to look at them. When I did, the shame and guilt returned—worse, perhaps, because I worked with children like Molly every day. Their lives were disturbingly real to me. I had merciless recurring nightmares about rescuing abused children, about fleeing with them through gunfire, carrying screaming babies across battlefields, struggling to stay afloat in deep, greasy water with two or three small children clinging to me. I would wake up from these dreams in terror—sweaty, breathing hard, with the echoes of my own panicked voice lingering in the air of the stuffy little room.