by Bill Clegg
Sir? Are you ok? Can I get you a chair?
The young nurse has mobilized and is now inches away. Her hands are out from her armpits and very lightly touching his arm, the same one the doctor squeezed. She smells like the deodorant Leah uses. Again, he does not respond. She is asking questions, simple ones, but to answer would be like agreeing, or giving permission for his father’s death. It is as if these hospital employees have come up with death as a thoughtful proposal and presented it as something they believe should happen now. And the only thing they need to make it so is Hap’s approval.
The nurse says something more, pats Hap’s arm and vanishes. Right away he misses her. He sniffs the air for her scent but there is no trace.
His phone vibrates with new texts—once and then again a few seconds later—but he does not remove it from the chest pocket of his shirt. He knows it’s Leah. He hasn’t been in touch with her since late morning. For reasons he only partly understands he cannot read her texts or pick up the phone and call her. He is offshore from his life, which she is the center of, and he is powerless to come in.
The phone has stopped vibrating. An old woman on a stretcher, strung up with tubes and wires, is wheeled from the room next to his father’s. A nurse glides her silently down the hallway and into the elevator. As she goes by, Hap recognizes the snowflaked gown tucked around her body; her emaciated and vein-tangled legs bent, one over the other, like a child’s. He feels a flash of jealousy. Not of her age, or the condition that has placed her here, but of the care she is receiving. She is surrounded by soft things, unburdened of responsibilities, and wheeled with sure purpose by capable hands down pink hallways.
No one is whisking Hap away. The longer he remains where he stands, the more the sickening feeling he has in his chest becomes heavier, more solid. It shapes into something he knows he will always know: that he failed. His father only ever needed one thing from him and in this he’d failed him. As he sees it—all at once and with pitiless clarity—in forty-eight years as this man’s son, he had one measly duty, one job that fell to him and no one else: to make sure he did not die alone. His father had wriggled out of Taliban captivity in Pakistan, survived plane crashes, bullet wounds, and a severe allergic reaction to a bee sting in the Adirondacks, but while his heart was exploding and he was taking his last breaths, frightened and alone and leaving this world, his son was two floors away eating macaroni and cheese and drinking a glass of milk. Of course it would be a child’s meal, Hap thinks, because isn’t that what he is? Not a man, but a selfish boy who’d turned his back on someone who’d required so little of him. As with Mo, there would be no second chance to get it right—not with his dying, not with his living. He would never again have another shot at being in that room when his father needed him, and there would be no making up for lost time.
Hap had been told he was lucky his whole life. By his mother, Mo, Gene, and Leah. But despite all the breaks, the good education, the loving kindness, his wife, his baby girl, his own good health, despite all these things he knows he should be grateful for, he feels not the least bit lucky. As he stands three doors away from the second dead father he neglected to know, the world has never felt so unfair.
Alice
The sun has set and it’s been hours since Leah took off. The baby is wild with hunger. Kay turns up with bottles and formula and to Alice’s great relief leaves the car running in the driveway as she hands off the pharmacy bag at the door. Of course she wants to come inside and meet her grand-niece and snap dozens of photos on her phone to instantly post on Facebook. But thankfully she respects the cue that for now the new mother and father aren’t receiving company. She knows Alice well enough not to ask questions, so she waves goodbye and reminds her that she’s only ten minutes down the hill if there’s anything else needed. Kay will surely report trouble to their sisters and cousins, but for now all Alice cares about is feeding her granddaughter.
There you go, she whispers, as the baby finally fixes her mouth on the rubber nipple after fussing and refusing it for several long minutes. The house goes quiet, seems to settle around them. Alice gently pushes fine black wisps away from the pink, nearly translucent skin of her forehead. Only now does she register the hair. Hap’s is dark blond to light brown depending on the time of year, Leah’s is a shade lighter. Here, Alice thinks, here finally are the maternal genes pushing through. None of them showed up in Hap—not in skin tone, nor eye color nor hair. But here, a generation later, are eyes as piercing and hair as dark as Alice remembers his mother’s.
* * *
Three weeks after she met Christopher to hear his amends, Lee’s niece Dana called Lee from Bryn Mawr. Alice remembers Lee being unusually flustered and upset as she explained that a young woman who worked for Dana’s family would be coming to the farm to stay for a while. Two days later, she turned up with Dana in a yellow Mercedes convertible.
Alice’s first impression of Lupita was how young she was, how skittish and quiet. Despite all the effort that was being made for her, she spoke very few words and didn’t seem to trust anyone. Lee gave the girl a choice between the former farm manager’s cottage behind the barns, and a bedroom next to the one Alice stayed in on the second floor of the main house. Lupita chose the cottage.
After a few weeks, she relaxed a little, and as her belly grew, she became more responsive, certainly more polite, but she never opened up. She did not explain what had happened, or who the father was, only that she could not have the baby in Connecticut and that she could never go back there.
Dana’s father was Lee’s brother and Alice asked her when they were alone whether he should be called. Oh no, that’s the last thing we need, for George to find out that Dana and I are harboring his caretaker’s daughter He wouldn’t understand and we’d have Lupita’s parents—and very likely George—on our doorstep by morning. Still, Alice knew Lee was worried whether or not they were doing the right thing. She pressed Dana several times for more details, but Dana ducked behind a performative yet unconvincing respect for Lupita’s privacy. They would never know why she was so deeply involved, why she’d offered to help to the extent that she had.
Alice had known girls like Dana at Bryn Mawr. They were there because it was what was expected of them. They used the school as a waystation between ski trips and excursions to Europe and always gave the impression that beyond the campus there were big adult lives that they were already involved in. What set Dana apart was how brisk she was, how no-nonsense. She was a fast girl, a glamorous one, and she was not a girl looking for a husband. When she first turned up with Lupita she looked right through Alice. When she asked Alice to fix her a drink, Lee stepped in and did it herself. By the second day, after Lee purposefully included Alice in the discussions of what to do, Dana reluctantly began to treat her as an ally. It was obvious that Dana and Lupita had a tense relationship. Though they never exchanged adversarial words or raised their voices to one another in front of Lee and Alice, there was a current of anger between them. Both of them seemed to have a lot at stake.
After Lupita gave birth at St. Luke’s, she held her baby once that Alice knew of and made it known that when the nurse took him away it would be the last time. The boy, another infant who would go without a name for his first weeks, wailed even louder than his daughter would forty-eight years later.
When Lupita and her son were discharged, she seemed desperate to sever her relationship to her child as soon as possible. She refused to leave the cottage and insisted that the baby stay in the main house. It must have been impossibly lonely and painful, Alice thought then and remembers now. She also remembers how Lee seemed to draw closer to Lupita after she gave birth, bringing a fresh nightgown and a soft cashmere blanket to the hospital room, directing the nurses to bring food and water. Lupita’s situation had stirred in her a desire to take care, to mother—something Alice recognized from her own experience with Lee. Still, she was surprised to see her friend respond with such nurturing force, and Alice resisted the j
ealousy and possessiveness that it triggered.
The first night they were back, Lee explained that Lupita had not changed her mind about adoption as they’d all hoped, and as soon as the baby was settled, she’d be leaving. When Lee told Alice the boy would be taken to an orphanage in Philadelphia where a friend of hers was on the board, an unfamiliar but powerful instinct in her was provoked. Here was someone not wanted. A needy thing who had no power to protect himself. Alice was twenty-five years old and on her way to becoming a tenured history professor at Lehigh. After Christopher, men terrified her and now that she was living in Bethlehem again, she’d accepted the improbability of her marrying. And so, with the minor sadness of someone who is, at once, both settling for something other than what had been long imagined, and eyeing with pragmatic excitement a lucky alternative, Alice recognized that this unexpected baby boy was her best chance at becoming a mother.
When Alice spoke to Lee about what she had in mind, Lee seemed more relieved than surprised. But before anything else happens, you need to speak to Lupita… it’s her decision, she said, and so Alice went to her cottage door that evening with tea bags stuffed with dried chamomile flowers.
Lupita was difficult to draw out, and so to fill the silence Alice spoke about her life—Bethlehem, Bryn Mawr, her family, Lee. She explained that she did not expect to marry but that she had a big family to rely on for help. Talk of family seemed to catch Lupita’s interest and so Alice prattled a blue streak about her parents and sisters, aunts and uncles.
Two days later, when Alice visited the cottage again, Lupita met her on the porch. She said she would agree to what Alice had proposed, but only if she promised to never tell the boy where and whom he had come from. You would be his mother and your family would be his family… He can’t be a guest, or a trespasser… He should not be treated like someone from somewhere else.
Alice agreed, but it took her weeks to appreciate fully what she’d committed to and what it would require to pull off. At first she thought that once she was raising the boy she could tell him whatever she wanted about his mother and how he’d been adopted. But when she considered this later she could not shake the memory of Lupita that day on the porch. She had been almost completely unresponsive and aloof in the weeks and days preceding the delivery, and all at once she became impassioned, fierce, insisting on what mattered to her, a primal force driving her from her silence. Alice would replay what she said that day for the rest of her life; remember her intensity, and her relief when Alice agreed to her terms, and then how she receded, almost immediately, the lifeblood that had surged and animated her moments before, gone. When Alice moved toward her, she flinched. She stammered something about being cold and needing to rest and quickly disappeared inside the cottage.
It was hard to know the girl then—she was traumatized, in flight from her family, everything and everyone she knew, giving up her child, unsure where she would live and how. It was as dramatic and important a circumstance as Alice had ever been involved in. But underneath it all there was something else, too, she and Lee both noticed a different energy emerge soon after it had been settled that Alice would adopt the baby. She seemed restless, if frightened—eager to begin her new life. They had the impression that the one she was leaving behind, for reasons that preceded her pregnancy, was one she’d long been ready to escape. Here Alice could identify with her. On paper Alice was a scholarship kid who went to college an hour away, only to return home to work a short walk from the house she grew up in; but she, too, had been desperate to leave the world she’d been born into. For less dire reasons, she suspected, but when she was Lupita’s age, escaping Bethlehem and the limitations of the life her parents expected for her felt like the difference between life and death.
Lee’s lawyer came to the farm later that day to talk through what was possible. He’d also brought a colleague who spoke with Lupita privately. When the lawyers left, Alice called Christopher. She now knew the one thing she wanted from him and when they spoke she was as direct as she had been with Lee at the Saucon Valley Country Club the first time they met. He hesitated after Alice finished. Responding first by explaining that when his mother died no one from his family was in touch about an inheritance or a will. He’d been cut out, which made the silence between them less complicated, but it meant that he couldn’t support a child. Moreover, he’d been planning on leaving the country soon. He’d taken a job as a photographer for a news agency to go to places like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Jerusalem to record what people in the United States needed to see. Alice listened to him describe his plans to live oceans and time zones away and she felt an unexpected relief loosen her ribs and chest and shoulders. She had not held out hope after they broke up, but the half-life of her old dream of a future with him must have lingered in her unconscious, out of sight, yet lurking. She’d blushed earlier as she dialed his number and remembered him ascending the porch steps last fall. When she felt her heart gain weight and her chest tighten, she didn’t link it to anything but the overall emotion of the situation. It shocked her now to realize she was still letting him go, accepting what was true. The heart is a stubborn muscle, Lee told her once when she showed her the love letters her husband had written to her from France when he was in the First World War. Whenever I read these I still believe he’s coming home to start our life. Alice’s feelings for Christopher were different, but still his leaving the country for a long time would help her finally move on, as would the boy, whom she named Hapworth, after Lee’s husband. It seemed exactly the right thing to do. This happenstance of a son. Her Hap.
She told Christopher that the only thing she needed from him was a marriage certificate so they could both sign adoption papers, nothing more. Lee’s lawyer said that being married was not a requirement for adoption, but Alice had made a promise to Lupita and she intended to keep it. She had her own family in mind, too, and how they’d need some toehold in a respectable story to make Hap’s arrival something other than shameful. Christopher could have as much or as little involvement in the boy’s life as he wanted. They would paper a divorce as soon as sufficient time passed and they could rely on the lawyer to guide them.
Christopher took a few days to think about it. By Monday of the following week he borrowed a car and drove from New York to meet Hap. I suppose this is the closest I’ll ever come to being a father, he joked solemnly as he held the pudgy towheaded infant who wriggled and cried. In a week they were married at the Allentown courthouse by the justice of the peace, and less than a month after that, thanks to Lee’s lawyers who were able to expedite the process, they signed the adoption papers. Lupita left with Dana the next morning, before anyone was awake. The only sign of them was Dana’s briefcase sitting on the third stair in the front hallway. Why she’d left it and where she took Lupita, Alice never knew. But when Christopher left a few hours later, he carried the marriage license and the adoption papers, as well as a book he’d asked to borrow from the guest bedroom he’d slept in, in a briefcase with gold monogrammed initials that were not his own.
Alice then told the biggest lies of her life. The first was to the chair of the history department at Lehigh to say that she’d need to take an unexpected maternity leave for the rest of the spring semester. Thankfully, the chair was a man in his late seventies who made it clear he was not interested in hearing how one detects a pregnancy so late in the term and forestalled the explanation Alice had begun to make by interrupting to say there would need to be some last-minute shuffling, but it would be allowed, and congratulations. And then, her parents. She sat at their kitchen table and briskly reported that she’d been asked to step in for a Fellowship at Oxford University and she’d be back at the end of the summer. Someone had dropped out unexpectedly, it was very last-minute, very prestigious, and, oh and yes, she was four and a half months pregnant, yes of course it was Christopher’s, he’d be coming with her, and she’d deliver the baby there. Of the many decisions she’d made since graduating from high school, this one was me
t by her family with more bewildered alarm than usual. But there had long been a barrier—a line drawn as her life became less knowable, especially if any aspect of her academic life was involved—that kept them from questioning even this development. After a thick silence, her mother’s first question was, What kind of hospitals do they have there?
In August, when she “returned,” she explained that she and Christopher had gotten married for Hap’s sake but that the relationship had fallen apart in Oxford and they’d no longer be together. She’d hoped that the wallop of so much news would distract her mother and sisters from the fact that Hap was impossibly large for a month-old infant. In fact, his size was nothing but celebrated, by her father especially. Now that’s a boy, he’d said with pride. Over time, Alice’s family, either through subtext or by meaningful nods, communicated their respect that she’d gotten married to cover up her carelessness. Behind her back, she assumed they gossiped that she’d taken up with a playboy who had his fun and moved on. But the relative ease with which they accepted the situation surprised her. Right away they pitched in with hand-me-down clothes and advice, old strollers, and offers to babysit. It was clear they saw it as a single blemish on an otherwise lily-white, if aloof and unknowable, life. She wouldn’t be the first daughter of Bethlehem to raise a son on her own, nor would she be the last. A few months later, with the help of Lee’s lawyers, a new birth certificate was issued. With the date of birth changed to July 15, Alice and Christopher listed as mother and father, and the original birth certificate sealed, the past had been papered over as well as it could be.