Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  As the discussion unfolded, it was clear to Julie that Ran and Amy were mostly concerned for Gilda’s mental state, her health, and her morale, seeking to reassure her that everything would be all right and that they were in total support. This somewhat defied the conventions governing parental reactions to unplanned unwed teenaged pregnancy—like Gilda, Julie had read plenty of stories in magazines and books about scandalized parents, ostracism, disinheritance, even violence. She had seen a movie about Irish nuns who enslaved pregnant girls in laundries and buried the babies in the foundations. What luck to live in calm, affluent Woodside. Judged by the measured kindness of Gilda’s parents, Gilda’s plight seemed only a minor pickle. Julie wondered how her own mother and father would have reacted if it were she. She basked a little in the serenity of membership in such a civilized family, though she did wish it were clearer that Gilda’s pickle had nothing to do with her. And she wished her grandfather would pay her college fees. Otherwise, Grandpa Ran and Amy were unbelievably nice!

  Still, what was to happen next was not discussed, and was clearly not going to be discussed in front of Julie, or until they had slept on it, or whatever the explanation was for the light, solicitous tone, their suggestion that Gilda ought to go to bed early. Gilda, clearly relieved to end the discussion, said good night and fled. Thus did Julie find herself being driven home to San Francisco, the back way through dark hills, alone in the seat next to Carla with nothing to say to her. Julie presumed she knew nothing about Gilda’s unwelcome state, or had she heard the whole thing?

  26

  Parenthood hath murdered sleep.

  Ran Mott was no stranger to family anxieties, since he had already raised the three children with Lorna—his two sons, who had generated fears, eventually proven valid, about wheeled vehicles, and one girl, Peggy, who as a teenager had not seemed likely to blunder into an unwed pregnancy. But now here was little Gilda, and pregnancy was the last thing he had worried about in her case, at least not yet. Till now, it was always her serious diabetes that had preoccupied him; now her condition was doubly precarious. Some sort of inept coitus interruptus, he had concluded from Gilda’s faltering description of what had happened. He reflected on how the specter of unwed pregnancy almost surreptitiously dictated the customs and decisions of all of Western society, maybe every society, his household included, and there was no point in getting worked up about the social aspects now, though he did have an impulse to go beat up the Aymes boy.

  His real fear now was that Gilda’s health could not support pregnancy, it would be a nightmare of metabolic crises and insulin shock. It was dangerous for young teens to have babies in the best of circumstances, and her diabetes was the worst of circumstances. Intervention would be needed immediately, but her psychic situation worried him, too. He hadn’t been able to tell how she felt about this emergency. Amy would talk to her, but still, he hadn’t been able to gather from her calm, almost pleased demeanor whether Gilda might not kind of want to have a baby.

  Alone in their bedroom, after expressions of shock, Ran and Amy almost instantly found themselves disagreeing about what to do next. Ran was firm about the health risks of pregnancy for diabetics, and about another set of risks even for healthy adolescents, their immature bodies, the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight in their babies. There was no way Gilda, in both these categories, diabetic and teenaged, could be permitted to give birth. To say nothing of the social difficulties and school. Also, an innocent child, she was a victim of this older man and should not be made to suffer the lifelong consequences of his cynical exploitation.

  To his surprise, his usually phlegmatically calm wife Amy began to sniffle and mop her eyes and murmur her reservations, her distress.

  “I know, I know, it’s so sad, there must be some way…” Could Amy pass the baby off as their own late baby? Le petit dernier, as they said in France. Could it be a niece’s, an impulse adoption as a sibling for Gilda, or a Russian orphan, or…Julie?

  “How can you be thinking this way?” Ran said. “Gilda’s health is the issue.”

  “I know, I know…”

  “And psychologically…”

  “What about that? It’s going to be horrible for her, whatever we do.”

  “There’s no question about that.”

  “What if…I can’t help thinking…” Amy, too, could research on the Internet. After untold more years of diabetic medication in her future, would Gilda ever again be able to conceive? Might this be the only chance she would have to be a mother? Would she blame them if, later, she couldn’t have a baby and had missed this chance? Over hours into the night, Ran teased out his wife’s deepest fear, unspoken, unsaid, the truly unsayable, an echo of his own: With the shortened life span of childhood diabetics, how long would they have Gilda herself?

  After an hour of anguished argument, Amy’s real feelings came out: her long-held fear that Gilda would not live. She had always been afraid Gilda would not live to grow up. Now another unsayable thing that occurred to both of them was that if something happened to Gilda, a possibility that had tortured them often, they would at least have her baby.

  They decided to sleep on the problem and talk to Gilda again in the morning, not, naturally, mentioning their unsayable real fears.

  * * *

  —

  This was the morning, unfortunately for him, that Hammond Mott had chosen to visit his father in his San Francisco office to ask for help with a down payment if they could find a house in a better neighborhood. He couldn’t erase the sight of the fainted Misty’s ashen green color, her slightly swollen belly, the look of her puffy ankles, the dried tears on her cheeks.

  Ran was himself in a trance of dismay, thinking over the words he and Amy had begun the day with, in disagreement even before breakfast, where they found Gilda serene and normal, ready for school as if nothing were different, finishing her cereal when they heard the crunch of school’s ride-share van’s tires in the driveway, and she ran off. Ran had left directly after, plunging into the morning’s commute traffic heading toward San Francisco, which he usually waited to avoid. Counting traffic, he had already experienced two upsetting encounters before nine o’clock, and now here was his son Hams, whom he hadn’t seen in—how long had it been?—and it usually meant saying no to something. Hams sat down; Ran indicated an array of coffee pods for the machine—espresso, Guatemalan, French roast. Hams shook his head no.

  “How are you, Hams; how is your wife? Misty.”

  “It’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about, Dad. We’re having a baby, I guess you knew that.”

  “Of course,” Ran agreed. “When is it? Must be soon.”

  “Well, in February. Life is going to change.”

  “It certainly is,” Ran said, regretting the note in his voice that revealed his real attitude about the threats or menaces of paternity in store for Hams.

  “We really think we should move to a quieter neighborhood, but we may need some help swinging that. We want to stay within our price range, for sure, but quieter. But the down payment…”

  “Whiter, you mean? Orinda or somewhere like that?”

  “We’d like to stay in Oakland but maybe in the hills, somewhere with a yard? We don’t have a yard to speak of, just a small one.”

  “You need the down payment?”

  “A loan, just, you know. I’m working and all that, but I know I won’t get far at the bank. We’ve got some money saved up. We’d get some back from our security deposit.”

  “Is Misty feeling all right? Healthy?” Ran couldn’t stop thinking about pregnancy, “nine months of pathology”; he’d heard that saying in medical school. Nine months of pathology for Gilda, Ran thought. Misty probably healthy as a horse, but did she do drugs? She looked kind of druggy, that nose ring, probably pierced nipples. He’d seen babies born addicted. Spastic limbs, cry all the time.

  �
��How much will you get back from the security deposit?”

  “We haven’t taken such good care of the yard,” Hams admitted. “Neither of us has much of a green thumb.”

  “No, gardening is not a family trait,” Ran said. “What price range? I don’t know anything about property in Oakland. I know everything has gone up.”

  “Going down, Dad. It’s a good time. There are a lot of foreclosures. Maybe something like a foreclosure would be cheaper.”

  “Well, Hams, I’d like to help. Can’t you give me a specific proposal? You know I’m retired, my income isn’t what it was when I was working. But my point of view is that since it comes out of your inheritance, you should have it when it will do the most good. I could probably come up with twenty thousand, that’s what I gave Peggy and Dick when they were buying that little house in Ukiah.”

  “That was a while ago,” Hams said. “Houses don’t cost as much in Ukiah, either.” He wondered if Peggy, who was always whining about being foreclosed, had come to talk to their father. Maybe he was feeling beleaguered. Twenty thousand wasn’t much of a help. “You get more house for less in Ukiah.”

  “Yes, true,” Ran said, “just let me know when you’ve got a specific property in mind. And keep me posted about the baby of course. I suppose you don’t have health insurance.”

  “Well, no.”

  “I can help with those expenses.”

  “Right, Dad, thanks,” Hams said, thinking of Curt’s three million dollars. He was too abashed to mention it, or say that twenty thousand probably wouldn’t get you the down payment on a shipping container these days. But at least his father had acceded to the general principle of a loan or even a gift and help with the baby. Yet, riding back on BART, he felt rising rage with his father, the sum of all the times he’d disappointed Ran, been reprimanded, been undervalued. He knew this was irrational; Ran had not said no to anything, yet he vowed again never to ask Ran for anything more. Ever.

  27

  We all need guidance, whether earthly or preferably from above.

  Though not at all metaphysically inclined, Ursula Aymes was moved to consult a spiritual counselor, the Reverend Philip Train, about her impending grandmotherhood and the moral dilemma it posed for Ian. She made an appointment with Reverend Train at the cathedral for the following Wednesday. She had never before sought advice from such a figure; usually she asked her Jungian psychiatrist to ask the I Ching. Now behind her need for Christian counsel was a need—unconscious perhaps—to get the news out, if only to one trustworthy person, to nail down the connection between the Aymes and Mott families. She didn’t analyze her motives, she just experienced a stab of unexamined spiritual anxiety. At some level she may have expected that the Reverend Train, though an Episcopalian, might interdict abortion no matter the age of the girl; weren’t they almost Catholics? She was not a regular churchgoer, but thought she should have some frame of moral reference when she talked to the Motts, and to her son Ian, though Ian might be surprised to have her invoke anything so solemn. Ursula had been raised a Catholic, and though she had given up the Church long since, it shadowed her still in the realm of sexual morality; in that of commerce too she was perfectly in tune.

  The Reverend Philip Train was used to people he knew socially turning up in the role of parishioner to ask advice even if they never came to church. Here was Ursula Aymes, at whose wedding—which of her weddings?—Philip had officiated. Her aroma of violets was somehow familiar.

  “It’s a sad situation, though hardly unusual,” he agreed when she had described the painful occurrence, adding, “I was in college with both Ran and also his first wife a hundred years ago. Lorna Morgan. I ran into her a few weeks ago. I gather there’s a new wife, the mother of this girl. I’m not in a position to speak to them about this, though. Haven’t seen them in years.”

  “Heavens no, and anyway, it’s nothing to do with Lorna,” Ursula agreed. “It’s for myself. I don’t know how to advise my son. Part of me feels he should do his duty by the girl, but that’s old-fashioned, I suppose. Ian is a good boy, he’s not a cad, but he hasn’t finished college, and he hasn’t a clue as to a profession. And the Mott girl is only fifteen years old.”

  “You can marry at fifteen in California if your parents okay it or with a court order.”

  “What an idea,” Ursula said.

  “It could be statutory rape, unless they married. He could be prosecuted,” Train said. “It depends on the age difference. How much older is he?”

  Ursula shuddered. “He’s twenty. Almost five years.”

  “Yes, well, to answer your question, which you haven’t asked, we—the Church—believe in abortion only for the life or health of the mother and in cases of severe birth defects. It is a sad situation and to be taken with utmost moral gravity.”

  “I understand,” Ursula said with a sigh. “My view exactly.”

  “Have you seen Lorna, by any chance? She said she was staying somewhere near the cathedral, but I’ve forgotten who she said she was staying with.”

  Ursula told him, wondering why he wanted to know.

  “I’ve forgotten her new last name, though she told me,” said the Very Reverend Train.

  A few days later, Ursula, taking a figurative deep breath, telephoned Gilda’s parents. Amy’s helper Carla answered and put Ursula through to Amy with so few questions Ursula surmised that Amy must have been expecting her call.

  “Ursula, what is your point of view on all this,” Amy asked, startling Ursula with her directness. They hadn’t even established what Ursula was calling about, and whether they agreed on details—for instance, that it was Ian responsible for Gilda’s condition.

  “It’s tragic, of course,” Ursula said. “Um, I’m very upset. Children these days—well, I am so upset with Ian, I hardly know what to do.”

  “Mmm,” said Amy. “We don’t, either.”

  “Is Gilda—well, she’s just a child herself,” said Ursula, feeling on safer ground with her sense that Amy and Ran were not including her in any escalating rancor. “Though she looks very mature.”

  “Mmm,” Amy agreed. “Girls mature earlier now than when you and I were adolescents…”

  “What to do?” said Ursula.

  “Gilda wants to have the baby,” Amy said.

  Ursula could not have explained her feeling of relief, the quickening of her pulse. An adventure lay before them—at least if Gilda got her way. “Is that your view, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy admitted. “Ran is against it, on account of her health—well, for all kinds of reasons. You know she’s a serious diabetic?”

  “I just want you to know Ian will do whatever is required of him, and I will, too,” Ursula said.

  Amy thanked her, somewhat stiffly, it seemed to Ursula, but you couldn’t blame her, really, for the note of frostiness toward the mother of the miscreant. Ursula understood.

  * * *

  —

  Amy did not go into the scene with Gilda which she and Ran had endured, the tears and hysteria when Gilda perceived that her parents were determined she not risk her health by having a baby. No more could Ran erase from his thoughts the scene with a child whose stoicism in her short life had always astounded them, who had never complained about the doctors, the hospital visits, the bruises, the streaks of blood beneath her skin after injections, the bottles of medicine, the needles in her tiny seven-year-old arms. She had endured all the intervening years of torture in silence; she screamed and sobbed in a way they had never heard her do: she had to have a baby now, she knew she wasn’t destined to live to grow up, and this was her only chance; she could feel the baby, it would give her life, might even cure her.

  “Honey, it just won’t be wise for you to risk your health, you know that pregnancy is nine months of pathology,” Ran began.

  “I don’t care. I want a normal life, n
ormal people have babies.”

  “When you’re older, when you marry someday…”

  “I’m never going to marry. Who would marry me anyhow with all my needles and pouches? At least I’ll have a baby. Let me do one normal thing.”

  “But honey, Gilda, honey dear, you have so much to do—finish school, college, you don’t want a baby to weigh you down, and other things—they wouldn’t have you at Saint Waltraud’s, you’d have to go to, I don’t know, some other school, or drop out…”

  Useless their attempts to show her how dangerous, how in their love for her they couldn’t let her risk her life or the future that lay before her with cures impending; how the collection of cells inside her was not yet a baby, not a person yet for some weeks; how the cells might be being damaged by her medicaments anyhow, how it could be deformed…How Ran and Amy ached to save, to soothe, to do something for this beloved being, without a clue as to what that would be.

  “I know I’m going to die, at least let me leave a baby in the world.” Tears ran on her cheeks. If they killed her baby, it would kill her, it would take with it the life force she had saved up, leaving her dead. What shocked them was that death—the outcome and even the word, which had always carefully been omitted from any discussions of her future—had been in her mind all along.

  She accused them of robbing her of her God-given and probably only opportunity to experience motherhood. Of parsimony, not wanting to support another family member. Of indifference to her emotional well-being. Ran and Amy had never seen their self-contained little girl rant in this manner and had retreated in shock.