“Yes. Well.” I had the good grace to look embarrassed at myself. But not much.
“What are you going to do when the nine months are up, which looks to be about any minute? I mean, you can’t stay pregnant for the rest of your life—people can count, after all. And I think it might be a little too late in your game to pull the oops!-just-another-phantom-pregnancy act now.”
“I’m sure you must be right, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“You haven’t gotten that far yet?” His voice rose to near screaming pitch. “YOU HAVEN’T GOTTEN THAT FAR YET???”
“Will you keep your voice down,” I admonished sternly. “Do you want everyone to hear?”
Passersby were giving us funny looks but, thankfully, more so at Trevor than at me. So far they’d been unable to suss out what we were arguing about—a fraudulent pregnancy—and, apparently, it was considered bad form for privileged-looking men to shout in public at women who looked as though they were going to sail into labor at any second.
“Do I want everyone to hear?” His desperate-sounding voice was a notch down on the volume level; thus, still pretty loud. He put his hands on his hips, his nodding head confirming to himself his own words. “Well, maybe I do. Maybe that’s exactly what I want. I think it’s high time you were exposed for what you are. You can’t be allowed to go on like this, playing with the minds and emotions of the people around you. Someone has to stop you!”
I shoved the shopping cart out of the way and got right up in his face. “Thames Waterways,” I said smugly, squinting my eyes up at him to play out the final showdown at the O.K. Corral.
“What did you just say?” His voice squeaked a bit as he blanched and tried to step away from me.
But I wouldn’t let him. I matched him forward step for backward step. “Thames Waterways was what I said, you toffee-nosed git.”
“But how did you…?”
“Behind the bed. You must have fallen asleep one night while reviewing your illegal scheme.”
Now it was his turn to plead for discretion. “Please, Jane, keep your voice down.”
I ignored him, still on the prowl. “Then, when you decided to abandon me and my baby…”
“You know that’s not what happened!”
“…you were so eager to leave in a hurry that you must have forgotten you’d ever had those papers in the flat with you.”
“Please. What will it take to shut you up?”
“Shut me up? I’ll bet that Inland Revenue would love to get a look at the information I’ve got on you. I’m sure they’d love to know about all of the extra money you’ve made and not reported and I’m sure your employer would love to find out that you’ve made it with insider information.”
“You wouldn’t do that to me!”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?” I watched him squirm. “Tell you what, Trevor, you and I are going to make a deal. You keep quiet about my little secret and I’ll be good enough not to have you thrown in jail for yours.” I grabbed my cart and bumped him with it again. “Now get out of my way. My baby and I have some shopping to do.”
It was that magical hour in London that occurs only on Christmas Eve.
Okay, Christmas morning, technically, since it was after midnight and long past the hour when all of those Christmas masses would have let out.
It was two in the morning and I was all alone, unable to sleep, had been alone in fact since I’d left work early with everyone else that afternoon. Oh, I’d had plenty of holiday offers—everyone wanted to keep me company, no one wanted me to be alone, as my delivery date neared—but I’d turned them all down. I just couldn’t face more well-meaning maternal advice from my mother and Soph for a baby that didn’t exist and I couldn’t deal with Dodo’s kindheartedness now that she’d returned from visiting Mona Shakespeare in the States. As for Constance, who knew what color contacts she’d be wearing on this of all nights? The idea of her staring solicitously at me with red-and-green eyes just made me shudder.
It was a good night for being alone, actually, for taking stock. Why, I hadn’t even been tempted to drink any alcoholic cheer. No, instead I’d spent the last several hours reliving the last nine months. And, as I relived it, I saw how in some small way my fake pregnancy had changed me. Maybe all pregnant women change. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe not—who is to say?
What I did also see, however, was that David had been right: the only way for me to move forward was to come clean…with everybody. It no longer mattered if The Cloth Baby was published, even if it was an ultragalactic success.
Correction, it did still matter, but not in the same way, because I realized now that my ultragalactic success as a novelist and taking responsibility for what I’d done were mutually exclusive things.
There was only one thing for me to do, only one thing I could do.
“Please be there, please be there, please be there,” I whispered to myself as I dialed the phone.
The phone rang once, twice.
“Hello?” he said, not sounding groggy at all, not like you’d think he’d sound at that hour.
“It’s Jane,” I said. “I need to talk to you. Can I come over?”
Supposedly the Eskimos have something like seventy-two words to describe the different variations on the theme that we English refer to as snow, while here we have just the one. Still, despite having just one word for it, a Christmas snow in London is much more benevolent than the snow that James Joyce chose to bury his Dubliners under in “The Dead,” and the slowly drifting fat flakes that were coming down now, coupled with the red, gold and green lights of the closed shops I hurried past, made for a perfect study in the Dr. Jekyll side of Charles Dickens.
I was on my way to see Tolkien and I’d decided to walk.
London is a walking city and he didn’t live very far, not to mention that I didn’t think it would be very easy to flag a cab at that hour on that night. Plus, it would give me just a little more time to think about what I wanted to say: the truth, of course, surely that, but there was no harm in working on the presentation of it.
One thing I was sure of, and that was that he deserved to hear the truth before anyone else. Just like a real father deserves to be the first to hear he’s going to have a baby, Tolkien deserved to be the first to hear that I wasn’t. I’d come clean with him, then everyone else.
On the phone earlier, before we’d rung off, he’d explained that he, too, had turned down holiday offers, preferring to spend it alone. He’d even offered to work that night and had just gotten off at midnight but wasn’t tired yet.
“I’ll see you in a little while,” I’d said hesitantly, torn because while I was anxious to see him in person, I was reluctant to sever the cord that was enabling us to talk right then and there; it was that good to hear his voice.
After putting the phone down, I’d gotten ready, getting the cloth baby out; not for deception now, but for safety’s sake.
The streets of London, at this magical hour that only occurred once a year, would be practically deserted. Nearly everyone would be with loved ones or drinking alone because they weren’t; everything would be closed. The only people out would be cops, people looking for trouble, and troubled souls.
It was the ones who were looking for trouble that a girl had to worry about.
Oh, sure, the way I figured it, even if everyone was supposed to be feeling all “God bless us, every one” on this one night, if I were to go out as just myself, I still might get accosted. But, having long since learned that everyone—even those who are nice to no one—treats pregnant ladies more kindly, I had strapped on my cloth baby one last time beneath my clothes.
Thus, I was Pregnant Jane, out for a holiday stroll.
I figured that I would start at the very beginning, tell Tolkien how I’d originally just wanted to be married like everyone else, whether Trevor was the right man for the job or not, how I’d first thought I was pregnant, then pretended I was while hoping to become so, then decided to go on pret
ending, again just so I could be like everyone else, have what everyone else had. I’d tell him about the book deal, although that part had come later.
It was hard to finally admit that I had become the very kind of person that I would normally laugh at: just like so many others, I wanted to have certain experiences—marriage, a baby—not because I genuinely wanted them at the time I was striving for them, but because the having of them would make me somehow normal.
I was just wondering how I could say all of that to him without appearing like an impossibly small person, and realizing that it was impossible, as I neared a stone church along the way.
I suppose if I’d just kept my head down, focusing on my own progress even as I focused on my own thoughts, I might have missed what happened next. But I didn’t. I looked up. Was it the soft cry that drew my attention from out of myself? Perhaps. I can’t say for certain. Anyway, I did look up and what I saw was a huddled figure with its back to me, bending over to gently place something on the church steps.
I stopped, watched.
The figure straightened, paused, then bent over once more, reached out a hand and appeared to caress what it had placed on the steps. Then it straightened once more and began to walk off, up the street, away from me.
I started to walk again myself, passing the church, returning to my thoughts.
She must have heard my footsteps—I saw now that the figure was in fact a she, because she’d turned to look at me. Then, a look of fear and sadness came over her face and she turned and began to run, moving faster as she went, looking over her shoulder occasionally to see if I was following, moving faster until she’d turned the corner and was gone.
I returned to the church steps to see what she’d left there. Well, I had to, didn’t I? It could have been something dangerous; it could have been a bomb. Even I have some sense of civic responsibility. In case of a bomb, the proper authorities would need to be notified.
It wasn’t a bomb, of course, I could see that clearly as I cautiously bent over what I now saw to be a basket with a soft blanket inside. I reached out a hand, tentatively pulled back a corner of the blanket.
There was a sleeping baby inside, a very tiny baby from the look of it, a very new baby. My movement must have wakened it, for it slowly, sleepily opened its eyes and gazed up at me with what evolved into a curiously considering expression.
“Hello,” I spoke softly, running one finger against its cheek. “How could anyone possibly bring themselves to leave you here?”
I realized that I didn’t even know yet if it was a boy or a girl. God, whatever it was, it sure was cute.
“Coo,” it cooed at me.
“Coo yourself,” I cooed right back. Good God! I hadn’t known I was capable of such a sound.
I know I should have taken it to the proper authorities right away, but I don’t imagine I was thinking straight right then. Or maybe I was thinking straight, thinking straight for the first time in my life.
I realized with a sudden lurch that I was finally ready to have a baby. I was ready to put another human being ahead of myself.
The proper authorities could be properly dealt with in good time. What was really important was that now I had a baby to raise, a baby who, from the looks of things, needed me just as much as I needed it.
I slowly lifted it, blanket and all out of the basket, slinging the basket over my wrist, in case I needed it for something later. Well, you never do know when a basket might come in handy, do you?
“Coo,” I whispered again, nestling the little body close to my breast as I gazed down at it. “You don’t want to stay in that basket forever, now, do you?You want to come out here where it’s safer somehow. There, there,” I soothed, “I’ve got you now.”
Then I began to walk, holding the baby close, walking step upon step until I reached my destination.
He held open the door as I stood on the stoop before him, the fake baby pushing my clothes out, the real baby in my arms.
“Tolkien,” I said, “I have something to tell you.”
Acknowledgments
If you’re still reading this book, after having finished what was clearly the last page of the last chapter, then it must be because you expect to be thanked. So here goes:
Thanks to Baratzes, Logsteds, DelVecchios, and Simonellis everywhere, with special thanks to: my mother, Lucille Baratz, for providing me with an unmatchable model of what a great lady should be; my aunt, Sadye DelVecchio, for a seemingly endless supply of ancient ruled paper, without which I might have given up long ago; and Grace Simonelli, Kathy Baratz and Vera Logsted, all of whom never failed to ask and always with expressions that clearly showed that they fully believed that one day the answer would be “YES!”
Thanks to my first readers: Jason Kessler, Greg Logsted, Robert Mayette, Kathleen O’Connor, Joan Philpott, Andrea Schicke-Hirsch and Sue Ann Siegrist.
Thanks to Livia Ryan and Stanley Klein for giving a little girl a little job in a big bookstore a long, long time ago.
Thanks to Bethel Public Library for providing me with shelter during my pregnancy, which curiously coincided with the writing of this book; special thanks to BPL Director Lynn Rosato for her gracious support of my “other” career.
Thanks to MOMS Club-South of Danbury, with particular thanks to Cindy Iazzetta, Alexis Scocozza and Vera Solovyeva—great women, great mothers, great friends.
Thanks to Laura Wininger for over a quarter of a century of friendship: I would do anything for you; you have done everything for me.
Thanks to Greg Logsted for twenty years of patience; for the use of his last name since 1989, thereby making my own that much more interesting; and for our daughter, Jacqueline Grace, the inspiration for all things bright and beautiful.
If your name does not appear on the above list, and you feel that it should have been included, feel free to call me and complain. Otherwise, thanks to everyone who has ever stood in my way, because you only made me more determined; and thanks to every single person who has ever even done so much as smile, because you’ve made my life easier.
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