Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  * * *

  —

  Peggy, drifting off to sleep in Lorna’s living room, felt a little cross with her mother, the way everyone fawned over her—the minister kissing her, an important Englishman turning up. The way she constantly asked her poor daughter to do the drive from Ukiah, such a drag. But she was happy to see Julie. What was Julie doing with that English guy anyhow? What on earth was the Circle of Faith? It suddenly came to her it was almost the end of the window she had for returning something to RealSteal, an expensive Céline handbag she thought she could resell well but changed her ideas about. She’d have to drive back to Ukiah tomorrow morning to get it into the mail.

  Lorna lay awake, too, still thinking about Donna and the letter she’d got from Curt. In some sense, she wasn’t surprised, had always felt Curt’s coma would mark his transition onto another plane. His mother did not entirely rule out legal or financial or sexual transgression, but never suspected a religious conversion. How little one knew one’s own children really, especially their spiritual lives. How could she help him, or help Donna, who was bound to be desperate?

  * * *

  —

  Dick Willover had the idea, which had always in his case proven correct, that if you found a puny, failing investment and fed it, it bulked up and thrived. In vain did his broker assure him this was not a reliable principle, but Dick always had the example of his last success, when a stock had split, or when a company had sold itself just after he bought some shares. He was an investor on a modest scale, but his proportionate gain was a satisfying confirmation of his ability to navigate the fiscal labyrinth and fortified him in his financial squabbles with his erstwhile partner Tommy, who was after him for what they used to call palimony. It was a hell of a lot easier to get divorced from a woman—there were guidelines for that.

  He checked with Ran Mott about Curt, made inquiries, and found himself in contact with Curt’s colleague Harvey Avon, who was warmly confidential about the finances of Mott Development, in the spirit of misery loving company. They met at the Cal Club and sat in the lounge bar.

  “I’ve tried every way of finding Curt,” Avon said. “Private detectives, want ads. Nothing. My lawyer is looking at contractual default clauses, things that would free me up to take over. But it would land me with the debt, too. He’s got a chunk of Mott Development wealth offshore somewhere, but the good news is he doesn’t have a chunk of the recent appreciation. Some of the decisions I’ve had to make myself have paid off; I’m not feeling so burned, though I’m not giving up on finding him, either. Our hydroponics is hot. Emplacements all around Watsonville. Big Ag! Love it! It still amazes me I’d get involved in something like Big Ag.”

  Dick had the fugitive thought of putting a few thousand more with Harvey Avon, in Big Ag or whatever you wanted to call it. He liked the man’s resilience, his acerbic brilliance, the fact that Curt had relied on him in developing amazing software, hardware, brick-and-mortar facilities—real salable things in the real world. He put some tentative questions, they ordered another drink and talked for some time, and settled that Dick would invest some more money in Mott Development, what a paradox, just the opposite of what he’d been intending to do. They also agreed that Avon had better talk to Donna Mott, to rule out interference from her, or seek her cooperation in dealing with Curt, wherever he was.

  33

  After the fainting episode, Misty had never come back to feeling well, and Hams was concerned about it to the extent of keeping an eye on her and asking about how she was feeling more often than she liked, but, she noticed, not doing extra chores or the dishes, oh no. She herself wasn’t worried, because she had not felt “well” for weeks now and was facing months; she was crazy to get it over with. Delphine, next door, had brought a strange little apparatus she said her son had liked, which looked like a chair on springs on which was attached a pair of little underpants with some sort of tray in front. The eventual baby was to bounce up and down in it, his little legs through the pant holes. This bouncy chair symbolized for Misty the forthcoming change in her life, which she dreaded more and more.

  * * *

  —

  Ian was not surprised to get an email from Julie Willover; there was something preordained about them getting together given their mutual friendship with Gilda, and the Situation. The meeting of Ian and Julie had been prompted by Gilda: she had asked Julie to try to find out what Ian really felt about the baby. “When I ask him, he only says he’d support anything I want to do. Just talk to him like a friend—even if he doesn’t say specifically, you can get an idea.”

  Probably that was why he had given her his address, unconsciously wanting to see her again. “Hi Ian,” she wrote, “would you like to have coffee one day? I know you’re concerned about my aunt Gilda? Her parents suggested I should talk to you about it; and of course it would be nice to see you anyhow.”

  Ian accepted promptly. It turned into more of a date, in that they had lunch and Ian paid. They went to Cafe Bronson near Ursula’s, where there was parking. Julie was a beautiful girl, Ian thought as she came in; Julie next to Gilda was like a painting next to an etching. Together, the strange coloring of Gilda always drew the eye, but apart, Julie bloomed with color and sexy ripeness.

  They ate pasta and eventually got around to the assigned topic: “My grandfather and Amy aren’t on the same side about Gilda, about what she should do,” she told him, “and everybody wonders what side you’re on.”

  “Having or not having the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I try not to think about it, I guess. If I had to say, I wouldn’t want to say get rid of it, so I’d rather Gilda decide, or her parents or whoever. Of course I’ll step up, as my mother puts it.” Whatever that meant. He then had a burger, so did Julie, to prolong the meal.

  Julie shivered with jealousy of Gilda to have had Ian inside her. That’s what she herself wanted more than anything. Over ice cream, when their eyes met, she thought she could read his similar desire. An idea came to her. She still had money Carla gave her for her Gilda lunches. While Ian paid the bill, Julie said, nearly choking on her temerity, “Would you want to go to a motel with me right now?”

  Amazed to hear this bold suggestion from this beautiful girl, Ian said, “Definitely. We should get better acquainted.” In his car, they kissed and discussed the whereabouts of motels. Lombard Street seemed like a good bet. In their state of almost unbearable suspended excitement, they had little to say except “That looks okay there,” “No, it says no vacancy,” “Try over there,” trying to look calm, ignoring the studiedly nonjudgmental demeanor of the desk clerk who showed them up the outside stairs. The door once closed, they fell upon each other without discussion. Each step brought happy surprises—her unexpectedly full breasts, his well-developed pecs and other splendid natural endowments, their mutual energy and enthusiasm. They happily passed the rest of the afternoon and stayed until nearly seven, when Julie, sticky and sated, had to be at work.

  Things progressed very rapidly between them after that. Their affair was more or less biologically inevitable, Darwinian, the lovely Julie very stuck on Ian, the handsome young man, the superabundance of hormones, the family connection of his mother as longtime friend and adviser to the Mott-Willovers, Julie’s admirably adventurous outlook on life—planning to go to Greece—his prowess at all things physical. They right away began having a great time in bed whenever they could organize it—when Julie’s roommates were at school or Ursula wasn’t home, or once or twice in Menlo Park when Ian’s roommate was away for the weekend. Ian, who had never had much sex, and never a steady ongoing affair, now gained in technique to match his talent. Julie, who hadn’t really seen the point of sex when she tried it in high school—had thought of it more or less as something boys liked and you put up with—suddenly got it with enthusiasm. Her body throbbed and moistened at the merest thought of Ian, and embarrassingly explicit th
oughts continuously intruded on her study of the Mediterranean market economy, or the legacy of the Peloponnesian War on contemporary Greek social attitudes.

  In both their minds, little Gilda began to recover a sort of virginal innocence, becoming, except for the inconvenience of her pregnancy, the incarnation of chastity, the remonstration of their own carnal preoccupations; she was their nice little teenaged friend. Even in bed they didn’t feel they were betraying her; they talked of her affectionately, admiring her good nature and her calm acceptance of the tough things fate had thrown at her, and her uncomplaining determination to brave the world—especially when it came to her health and facing down her parents. They wanted to help her.

  As their love grew, there occurred to Ian and Julie separately, but they did not discuss, the idea that if the two of them got married, they could disappear for a few months and come back with a baby that people would assume was theirs. Or even without getting married, either way helping Gilda and maybe getting some financial help from her parents, given Ian’s part in the affair. No one must know they were screwing their brains out; Gilda, Ursula, Ran, Amy—everyone would freak out at the very idea.

  It was his mother who kept urging on Ian some sense of his financial responsibility for the baby. They all knew he was a penniless college student and the Motts were loaded, but Ursula felt that fathers, in order to keep a say in a child’s upbringing, needed to come up with some support, at least from time to time. Specifically, she was afraid the Motts would buy the baby and edit Ian out.

  Ursula was a practical and ambitious woman, not in a bad sense, as she put it to herself; it was actually a maternal duty to scheme a little for the future of your children, and as she had only the one, the precious Ian, it was doubly incumbent upon her to understand his deficiencies—mostly youth—and supply the remedies, the assurances, the steering of him upon a right course. At the moment, his future seemed a bit bleak: twenty years old, an unimpressive college record, no discernible interests apart from soccer—she would not have included sex among his pursuits until belied by this development—a baby coming, the mother a fifteen-year-old child.

  She rallied: on the plus side, his good looks, amiable and compliant nature, sterling character—truthful and thoughtful—and intelligence visible in occasional flashes though usually hidden under his jock façade. She could in good conscience quite apart from maternal pride hope to see him placed within, say, the Mott family with its millions or billions and its jobs to dispose in software development; they wouldn’t be disappointed in him.

  But Gilda—her age! There was no solution. A child of fifteen could not marry and set up house. A boy of twenty, either. There was no scenario of the future involving that. Should she herself offer to adopt the baby? She should reassure Amy and Ran again that she would do half, or her part, or whatever was required—financially, that is; she didn’t see herself doing child care. That was the course she resolved upon, offering to help, without knowing what it would be.

  It was now mid-July. Gilda must be more than a month along—the baby would be born mid-March. That meant when school started next September, she could be showing a bit, so Amy and Ran had better let it be known now she’d be starting a new school in the fall, maybe in Switzerland or at an unnamed school in the East. What if her parents were required to be on the East Coast for some months and took her along? Or were planning a season on, say, the Riviera, or were putting her into a Swiss school for the term? Many things that would seem implausible for regular people seemed easier for the rich, a truth beyond question. What more normal than for the Motts to go to San Tropez, say, or Rome for a season? Ursula’s practical planning skills came powerfully to the fore.

  Ursula lived in a stylish Victorian on Washington Street in Lower Pacific Heights amid handsome furniture made from whitewashed tree trunks, imposed by a fashionable decorator she had briefly dated. She was pleased, of course, when her son started coming home weekends, which he never used to do, though his sports gear and bags of washing seemed out of place with the serious white upholstery and expensive drapes. He normally stayed at college down the peninsula, doing weekend soccer and whatnot with his friends; now, oddly, he appeared at her house most Friday nights and midweek sometimes twice, but never ate at home and was slightly taciturn about his plans. Ursula could divine that they didn’t involve Gilda, and she was determined that little Gilda not get her heart broken. She tried to talk to Ian about his moral duty, not only to the baby, if there was to be one, but to Gilda, a duty of normal civility and concern. She got no argument about that, but it still didn’t seem to her that he spoke to Gilda very often, and he never went to see her. She did surmise that he was terrified of her parents, who had made no effort to invite him over or get to know him. She was right about his terror of Amy and Ran. She had no sense of Julie in the picture.

  * * *

  —

  Ran Mott had initially accepted Ian’s role in Gilda’s plight as almost accidental, incorporeal, almost as if an airborne seedpod had drifted by her and was merely inhaled; but as time went by he had begun to focus on the young man’s responsibility, and his iniquity. Though by no means a vindictive person, Ran found himself hoping for bad things to happen to Ian. In idle moments, Ran’s well-honed drowning fantasy obsessively flitted across the screen of his imagination: now Ran and Gilda are in the rowboat on some lake, Ian in the water. Father and daughter laugh as they row off. How long can Ian tread water?

  Another scenario, to be taken seriously, involved informing himself about statutory rape, age of consent, accusations involving jail. But what—something short of incarceration—would punish him and at the same time oblige him to spend all the weekends of his foreseeable future taking the toddler to the park? That was punishment for sure. Yes, Ian needed to be legally required to spend enormous amounts of time with his child. Supervised, of course, in case he was an abuser.

  Thus his somewhat-obsessive ruminations, possible to forget only by playing tennis, or in conversations with Amy on other topics, or in medical reading. He came to dread his drive to his office, when the Ian hate thoughts could not be dismissed, but kept creeping in among the weaving lanes of traffic on 280.

  * * *

  —

  Now Ran’s thoughts wandered to how they could use Carla in some way in the Gilda situation. Ran and Amy had decided to consult her on the new family drama—she often had insights into Gilda’s phases that had escaped Ran and Amy. Also, Gilda’s condition would soon be obvious to her anyhow. Carla’s devotion to Amy and Ran was reliable, especially to Amy, and to Gilda it was practically fanatic, that of a mother or, better, a grandmother, meaning she never disciplined, only indulged and advised when asked. It was a problem for her that Gilda didn’t ask her things very often; she seemed to understand Carla’s rank in the family as someone who could be overridden, or at best was another adult, therefore aligned with her parents were divisions ever to appear. But she depended on Carla for rides, errands, and, occasionally, advice: How does this look? Should I wear the blue one?

  In his mail, the usual collection of ads, invitations, and bills, was an ad/invitation to the opening of Tory Hatcher’s latest photographs at a gallery whose mailing list he was on. He and Amy were vaguely acquainted with Hatcher’s photos, though didn’t have any of her work in their collection. According to the little history in the catalog, when in Pont-les-Puits, France, Tory Hatcher had managed to elude an irate gentleman who had tried to prevent her from going into the market hall and got to photograph a local event, a picturesque but macabre spectacle of bones and skulls laid out on pillows of muddy rags. She thanked the PhotoArt Gallery on Geary that the show could be put up quickly when the gallery had had to cancel another show, of prewar Appalachian mining towns, when the photographer encountered framing delays. Ran idly thought of going to the Hatcher exhibition, out of mild curiosity to see the French village where his children had been going to visit Lorna all t
hose years.

  34

  We all value edification, if only for the self-satisfaction it gives.

  The audience gathered at the Altar Forum that afternoon for Lorna’s lecture was seated in the small conference room off the vestry, about thirty women and a couple of men, all smiling in welcome. The women of the Altar Forum were nice-looking Californians, mostly between forty and fifty, wearing pants and blazers, the women with shoulder-length hair and good handbags. The French-influenced Lorna couldn’t help but notice people’s handbags. She’d been amazed at Donna’s beautiful one, apparently new, seen when Donna stopped in with Curt’s letter: red, stamped crocodile—surely not real crocodile?

  A screen had been set up in the back, and Lorna had brought her laptop containing her PowerPoint presentation. A youngish man in overalls organized the cords and plugs. The Very Reverend Phil Train was talking to a group of the women parishioners to one side but waved to her. When people had settled into their chairs, he addressed them.

  “We didn’t dream back at Stanford—I hate to say how many years ago—that my classmate, the sweet, frivolous little Lorna Mott, Morgan then, would morph into one of the world’s leading authorities on the tapestries of Angers. It’s such a privilege to have her here today to tell us something about these wonderful, holy works. I’ve been shown some of the photos, but we’ll see them in much more detail on the projection screen.

  “First, though, we’d like to hear—Lorna, what path took you from coed at Stanford to authority on French tapestry?”