Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  She did still feel that Peggy was capable of better than wind chimes, and thought Peggy should be mature enough by now to handle the realization that her mother thought she could do more with her talents. Lorna was brooding along these lines when the phone rang again. It was Armand-Loup, calling from France. Her heart quickened with dismay.

  “Allô, Lorna, chérie.”

  “Armie?”

  “Oui.” He explained why he was calling—the painting she was to sell in behalf of Pont-les-Puits. Lorna, relieved it wasn’t something that she was expected to pay for, agreed, if they could get the painting to her. Afterward, she mulled over the drastically impersonal conversation, as if he were an art agent or a stranger, and she found his cold tone even worse than if they’d fallen into one of their fights; it provoked her into a tear or two, almost. Twenty years. She thought of their frolics in bed. Did he have a permanent someone else already, who had supplanted her, who had erased any note of intimacy in his voice? But what did she expect?

  30

  Pace Freud, does talking about a problem always make us feel better?

  Gilda had not been confined to her room, but that was the practical effect of the solemn, unnaturally solicitous, and kindly expressions worn by her parents over the next few days. They were always proposing eagerness to talk or, worse, asking to hear what she was thinking, feeling, remembering. She dreaded their questions about her health. And her mental health. She was fine, but she stayed in her room, reading.

  Gilda’s bedroom was vast, decorated in a handsome English chintz of yellow roses, with French doors opening into the garden, an altogether-pleasant place in which to hang out and avoid parents. Here were her bed, her desk, her books, her diary, TV, teddy bear, girlish stationery with a border of flowers and little birds, marked with her initials, gjm.

  She had decided to write to Ian. To say what, she wasn’t sure. She just had the impulse, the need to communicate about their scrape, and she felt funny calling him, and anyway didn’t have his number. She didn’t feel in any rush about anything—she figured she was only four weeks’ pregnant, and after all, there were forty weeks altogether. Anything could happen.

  Dear Ian,

  I’m wondering what people are saying to you—I mean your mother etc. My parents are concerned but my feeling is that I’d sort of like to go ahead, not for any religious reason or anything like that, but I do think things happen for a reason.

  But I don’t want you to feel any pressure or that you have to take a role, I don’t mean that at all. I just believe—have actually been taught by my parents—that you have to have a go at life even if it doesn’t go as expected. They are always talking about my disease—you know I have diabetes and in the summer I go to diabetes camp, where they say the same thing. So this is my personal deal, and luckily I know my parents can afford to support my decision. I DON’T CARE about what people say, or about scandal. If you want, I won’t ever mention you.

  How to sign it gave her some hesitation. “Love, Gilda”? That seemed too possessive in the circumstance. In the end she signed it:

  Affectionately, Gilda

  She would have to figure out where to send it. She didn’t like it to go to his mother’s house, the only address she could find, though in the end that was what she had to do. She didn’t think it was time to propose names for a baby, but she wondered what he would think of Pomona for a girl. The goddess of abundance. She was taking Latin at Saint Waltraud’s, her favorite class.

  Ian, a gentlemanly young man, well brought up according to the notions of his European-born mother, would never do something like reveal the name of a compromised woman, but did fall into general discussions about the female sex with his male friends, discussions he sometimes welcomed for the brotherly advice they offered and was sometimes offended if someone was too gross about a girl someone was dating, say, or about women in general. He accepted the level of discourse common to his species—guys—but had little to contribute from his side, had not had serious girlfriends or problems before this.

  Now, however, he was in a bad situation and needed to understand what a woman in Gilda’s spot would be going through. Would he be a target of her anger, for instance? Of the long arm of her powerful parents? Was she obliged to be in love with him as the father of her baby? Should they go to Mexico or somewhere out of the light, to have an operation or get married? Was he a sex criminal? He was nearly paralyzed with contrition.

  He was ashamed of certain unworthy thoughts that crept in, too, like getting a big payout from the Motts to drop a claim of paternity, or landing a great job at Gilda’s mother’s biotech firm.

  Today he was in that bastion of male provenance, the weight room at Mountain View Community College, where he was enrolled for two makeup courses and played right midfielder on the intramural soccer team. The air of the weight room had the pleasant scent of rubber mat and sweat, comfortable and familiar, against which the female world, with its difficult realities, seemed distant and repulsive.

  He brought the Subject up as casually as possible, in the vein of “a friend of mine has got a girl in trouble.” No one was fooled by the “friend” thing. “Dude!” A problem of this magnitude deserved respect. He felt enveloped for a few moments in the intangible but warming regard of his friends, respect mixed with relief it hadn’t happened to them. No one seemed surprised it was Ian in this fix; though he seemed unconscious of his unusual beauty, no one else could be, and his friends imagined mistakenly that women threw themselves at him right and left. There was commiseration about his fix. Many of his teammates contributed anecdotes and hearsay. She can get it taken care of, get it adopted—no biggie. But for a relationship it was a negative, the beginning of the end.

  His mother also seemed to treat him with a measure of solicitude that both puzzled and pleased him. He began to dream idly, while driving up to San Francisco from his apartment in Mountain View to see her, of the respectable and adult state of paternity, maybe even wedlock, when he would have finished Stanford, say, and lived with Gilda in a little house in Woodside near her parents, with a squash court, say, or at least a pool, and playing soccer at the Menlo Circus Club nearby, and studying something interesting like astronomy, which he was taking an introductory course in for the core courses needed to transfer. And if he married Gilda, he wouldn’t be a sex criminal, and also he could fuck her properly; he’d made kind of a mess of it, not a very nice first sexual experience for her.

  * * *

  —

  Ran and Amy had agreed to disagree about Gilda’s next step regarding her pregnancy, with Amy ambivalent about what to do, and Ran, convinced of the dangers to her health, believing they should end it. They had only a few weeks to decide, after which an intervention—the euphemism they used—favored by Ran, would be too late, at least by the pill method; they had a bit longer if by D&C.

  He understood that something in women, even, evidently, girls as young as Gilda, and entrepreneurs as successful as Amy, predisposed them to adore infants, never mind how they treated them later; overall, he deplored the tendency of women to get pregnant at all. “Women just irrationally respond to the idea of babies. All women do,” he accused Amy. He did remember feeling a similar emotion as he felt now of disapproval of Lorna, back when she had kept getting pregnant despite their efforts to the contrary. He recognized how essential it was that Gilda, and Amy, too, be comfortable with an intervention, so he saw no problem easing off the discussions, postponing them as long as they could. Physically, in the next couple of weeks, Gilda showed no signs at all of her condition—no changes in her appetite or thickening of her waistline—he even wondered about some sort of bizarre Munchausen syndrome or pseudocyesis. But of course it was much too soon for her to be showing. And this didn’t make pregnancy less dangerous for a fifteen-year-old diabetic. They had found the right specialist in diabetic pregnancy; Gilda had gone to her appointments
with uncomplaining docility.

  They also had a talk with Mrs. Klein, Gilda’s longtime therapist, and brought her into the picture. Gilda had been seeing Mrs. Klein for years, every month or so, ever since second grade. She seldom told her much—mostly stuff that happened at school. It was understood that Mrs. Klein didn’t disclose Gilda’s secrets to her parents, and they didn’t pry, but so far there had never been anything they couldn’t know. Now Mrs. Klein was nonplussed at what she had failed to pick up.

  “I hadn’t even realized Gilda was sexually active,” she said in dismay to Ran and Amy, who had implored her for advice. “She hasn’t shared that.”

  “Nor with us,” said Amy. “Well, she wouldn’t, would she?” She told Mrs. Klein such details as she knew. Mrs. Klein definitely agreed that it was important that Gilda, once she understood all the ramifications of her plight, felt herself to be the one making the decision about what to do next.

  “Gilda has a desperately negative body image, and so her feelings about this will be complicated. She may feel that pregnancy is very positive, a sign of health and power. Any intervention could be seen as failure. It would certainly be better for her not to have a baby, but the situation is delicate.”

  They thanked her; it was sort of as they’d feared and what they’d been seeing. Amy and Ran had always been in a sense afraid of Gilda, afraid of crossing her and somehow setting off a negative physiological effect, a diabetic crash or something. They knew their inability to assert themselves was a reflex of their feeling guilty for whatever bad genetic combination they had cursed her with, but knowing that didn’t help.

  “I’d like to see Gilda as soon as possible,” Mrs. Klein said.

  When Gilda came to her appointment, Mrs. Klein found her worryingly calm. The girl said very coherently that she welcomed the baby and had always been afraid she wouldn’t be able to do the things normal girls could do—like having a baby—so she was reassured now, and, yes, she was aware of the awkwardness around having to skip a semester at school.

  Mrs. Klein, who was trying to be neutral, said, “Gilda, you are a little unrealistic about the negative social consequences of unwed motherhood. You are a young teen with many years of education ahead, and bright prospects. You like school and are good at it. You don’t want to spend your life bagging groceries.”

  “I would still go to school, Mrs. Klein.”

  “Some schools don’t accept unmarried mothers. And who looks after the baby? And you miss all the normal things for girls your age—the prom and so on. Editing the school paper.”

  “I don’t care about all that.”

  Beyond reporting this to Amy, Mrs. Klein kept between herself and Gilda the details of the conversation, as Amy expected she would do. In fact, there had been very few details. Gilda might be a virgin for all she seemed to know about what had happened.

  * * *

  —

  Amy and Ran went up to the city and took Julie to dinner at the Fairmont to discuss Gilda.

  Julie had some ideas about how to handle the situation. “Grandpa Ran, I told you about my hope of studying in Greece in the fall? That’s why I was working at the gala? I was thinking that if I could afford to go, I could take Gilda with me to Greece. It might be a good solution—she’d see all the things, Parthenon and so on, very educational, the Grand Tour. With her niece, only we’d say I’m her aunt, that she had this chance while her aunt was going to be there, she could clear it with her school very openly, and then when we were there, she’d take Greek and stuff. Come home knowing Greek.”

  “And just happen to come home with a baby, too?” But the solution to that was obvious: the baby would be Julie’s, or a Greek orphan or something.

  “The only trouble with Greece is I haven’t saved enough money yet,” Julie said, heart pounding at the temerity of this broad hint. Grandpa Ran seemed not to notice. No money was proffered. He thought it was not a bad idea, except for his view of Greece as a place full of men in sleeveless striped shirts and neck scarves, and dumpy women in black, where people gave birth in caves.

  “No.”

  Or another idea, “The Circle of Faith sponsors adoptions sometimes,” Julie said.

  She had to explain about the Circle of Faith, which Ran and Amy of course thought sounded completely fraudulent, maybe sinister, even with the participation of an important British politician. Julie could hear as she was describing it how New Age and flaky it sounded, a bunch of comfortable San Franciscans who, to quote its literature, “help raise money and awareness about shelters for orphans in Africa, and teach them positivity and reading.”

  “We would take the baby!” Amy cried. Out of the question that strangers in a cult would take their baby. Carla? Could Carla be the designated mother? Or Amy herself, only a little too old, or maybe not even; these days people had babies up into their fifties. They could raise the baby. For one hallucinatory moment, Ran felt his life, which had already reset once when they had Gilda, more than twenty years after his first batch of children, now reembarking on child-rearing, trapped for eternity in a permanent time warp where he grew ever grayer and more bent of spine in a purgatory of vaccinations, aggrieved nannies, and diaper pong.

  * * *

  —

  With uncanny accuracy, the gods, knowing the perfect moment to heap another torment upon their designated sufferer, had clearly noticed Ran; he had nothing but vexations. He was not successful at getting the evil website slandering Curt taken down, and it looked like he would have to go to some extreme measures—there were people who could do it for an enormous price. And to add to the situation of his adored child Gilda, and his troubles over Curt, came the return of another aggravation, the small lawsuit aimed at him by a woman who had in fact hit his car with her bicycle, not the other way around. She had hit him, scratched his passenger door, and claimed to have cracked a rib. Not looking where she was going, not noticing that Third Street curved gently to the right when crossing Market to enter Kearny, she had gone straight on and ridden smash into the right side of his car.

  He’d ascertained she wasn’t hurt and waited with her until an ambulance came to take her to her health-care facility to be checked over. Had suggested driving her there himself, but she’d preferred an ambulance—suspicious, in retrospect. Some care had been taken to downplay his identity as a doctor, or well-known name—that she not be aware of his general affluence, Amy’s, that is; and the modesty of her claim had reassured them she wasn’t a scammer. She was suing for one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars. This had happened a year—almost two years—ago and been confided to his insurance company and forgotten, and was suddenly back.

  But he’d made a mistake, he saw now, in giving in to irritation. He’d directed the insurance company to counterclaim, or whatever they did, and not admit guilt: the accident was not his fault. The bitch had hit him, not the other way around, and he didn’t want to be blamed or have his insurance rates go up, or his perfect driving record blemished. The insurance people had protested but sued her back, or so he’d thought. Yet, here, a subpoena and a deposition date. He was flabbergasted. Of course this was only a trifle compared with the Gilda situation, but just one more thing he didn’t need.

  He was required to turn up at a lawyer’s office—he had the name somewhere—next Tuesday to be deposed. He drove himself to his office on the appointed day and, rather than struggle with the parking downtown, took a taxi to the offices of the enemy lawyers, Schwartz, Kaufman and Cinders, on Spear.

  Ran and Amy’s legal affairs were normally conducted by senior partners in Henson Bernstein Jaeger, but sitting in on the deposition insisted upon by the lawyers for the woman who had run into his car would be one of the junior partners, Casey Schwartz; he’d been advised of this by letter, but was still surprised at the apparent youth of Casey Schwartz, a tall young woman with glasses and a power suit who looked to him about twenty-fi
ve. Her youth mildly offended him. The enemy lawyer was also a woman, somewhat older, who projected a glitter of dislike for him when he came in. Ran was told to sit beside Casey, and the two women were arrayed across from each other at the table and armed with yellow legal pads and pencils. There was also someone taking notes. Ran supposed this was okay, or else his side—Miss Schwartz—would have objected.

  After answering some simple questions about his age, home address, and the make of his auto, the enemy lawyer asked, “Did you see Miss Powers before you hit her?”

  Ran was irritated by this clumsy trick question, which seemed to indicate they thought they were dealing with an idiot or someone senile.

  “I did not hit Miss Powers, she hit me,” he said mildly.

  “Before the impact, I should say,” the opposing lawyer corrected herself.

  “No, she came at me from the side, the passenger side. I could not have seen her.” Casey Schwartz gave him an intense look that meant, probably, Don’t elaborate. She had warned him to answer briefly and not embroider, though he hardly considered a plain statement of fact embroidery. She led him to disclose in grudging monosyllables the details of the accident, though Kaufman and Cinders plainly knew them; the enemy lawyer had a sheaf of photographs and testimonials.

  When the ordeal was over, he went with Casey Schwartz into her office. “I think that went very well, you did well,” she said. Ran also found this irritating. Why did he have to be here at all? He, a victim, grilled like a thief and patronized as a dotard. But instead of uttering this complaint, he expressed his unconscious preoccupations with a question about California laws on statutory rape and child endangerment. The disconcerted Casey Schwartz said, “I don’t know anything much about that. I think the age of consent in California is sixteen.”