Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “Think about it,” said his mother. “It’s in everyone’s interest, Gilda included, I hope I don’t have to spell out all the reasons why.” Ian had a perverse wish to make her spell them out, make her confront the venal and empty foundation of the whole idea. Instead he pleaded a date and got away. He had seen from his studies that the history of the world attests to the number of bad ideas that nonetheless prevail, from inertia, from the absence of good counterarguments, from fanaticism or wrong convictions, from connivance and self-interest.

  Thence the idea that Gilda and Ian should marry, fortified by centuries of tradition, prevailed over the common sense and financial puissance of Ran and Amy; they knew perfectly well that it was unwise to entangle Gilda legally, but they were also intimidated by Ursula’s resolve, and by the absence of any good arguments against marriage they could admit to, and by the unconscious vestiges of their own belief in society’s oldest conventions. After all, weren’t they married themselves?

  Just a quickie—city hall, a nice dinner, followed shortly by annulment, just to get something on the books. They all agreed on the formula, even, eventually, Gilda, when it was explained to her that she wouldn’t actually have to live with Ian or perform any of the duties of a wife. At school they were reading the Odyssey in translation, and were starting Caesar in Latin, and she had decided to become a classicist; she was all wrapped up in that.

  Soon there were modifications to the city hall plan, so that it wouldn’t be a sordid or bad experience for the young people. Say have it in the Mott garden, early in August, family only, and they’d ask the Very Reverend Phil Train, who was aware of the situation, to officiate. Neither Ian nor Gilda paid attention, but neither raised a fuss, either, which worried Amy and Ran. The only one who was horrified by it all was Julie, when Ian told her what was in store for him. It fell on her like a curse of God. In her heart she had imagined she herself would marry Ian someday.

  “Ian, you can’t do it, you don’t love her, you’re still in college, what about us?” She had millions of arguments, millions of words like this, and inexhaustible tears.

  “Not really a marriage. More like a legal arrangement. We won’t be living together or anything like that.”

  Julie felt her misery deepen to an omnipresent bass note in her life, like the low note of the baroque continuo. Her life was in chaos already. With some help from Ran, she had finally got the money for a place in the Peace and Conflict Studies program in Athens, but had just about decided not to accept it, because she couldn’t give up the biological compulsions that now defined her whole being—Ian. Her biggest problem until now was how to tell Grandpa Ran she didn’t need the tuition he had handsomely agreed to pay. Luckily she hadn’t yet officially resigned from Peace and Conflict and could still go drown herself in the Aegean or jump into a crater. Her misery, she knew, was shared by Ian, but his sense of duty was ingrained, too.

  “How can I not? The facts are there. It would just be, you know, on paper…”

  Julie had her ideas about men and what they would expect to do when alone with their wives, however ill sorted a couple they were. She didn’t mention this to Ian, didn’t want to put ideas in his head.

  “You have to tell them you won’t.”

  “But, Julie, it’s my fault. I can’t not.” These sentiments were repeated over and over, the scenes escalated, then ended in tears, and then sex, and then, alone at night, more tears as Julie foresaw the end for all time of her happiness. She made Ian promise they would still make love at their present rate. She tried not to hate Gilda, but she did, hated her privilege, her beautiful house, her silver hair, her unconsidered sense of entitlement.

  * * *

  —

  “Where will they live?” Ursula asked the Motts one day, assuming the young couple would live at the Mott house in Woodside. The Motts had not thought this through, either. Amy and Ran didn’t even have to discuss the unthinkable idea of Ian and Gilda living together, and all that implied. Fifteen years old! Ran at last said that Gilda would continue living at home, of course. He didn’t say he didn’t give a fuck what happened to Ian, but he wasn’t living with Gilda or them. He didn’t have to say this; it was clear.

  “A young married couple not living together?” Ursula said. “That would be odd.” Seeing their expressions, Ursula’s mind whirled. Was the marriage not to be consummated? Was it that the young couple wouldn’t…didn’t a baby constitute proof of consummation already? The whole plan seemed so—so unnatural, and yet did she really want to think of Ian condemned to live in a student apartment with a spoiled, indifferent young teen he barely knew? She had a vision of the student apartment in South Palo Alto or Menlo Park, the bride cooking really terrible meals, she herself invited to eat with them, lending a hand so that poor Ian wouldn’t starve.

  “After all, they aren’t a couple,” Amy said, agreeing with Ran. “We think Gilda could stay in school and finish the fall quarter at least. If she transferred to a school on the quarter system she could finish the September-to-Christmas term; we just haven’t found the school. We’re thinking abroad.”

  * * *

  —

  Realistic concerns reasserted themselves and Julie had changed her mind about refusing Greece; she would go after all, and when she had thanked her grandfather for his help with the tuition, it prompted in him the idea that abroad might be the answer for Gilda, too. Greece might do. Julie would be there, it was an advanced nation but without the shared cultural assumptions of, say, England, where people could all too easily read the stigmatizing implications of a young pregnant woman, seemingly single and far from home. For all the Greeks knew, it might be quite normal for Anglo-Saxon females to await motherhood familiarizing themselves with the Acropolis and reading the Iliad in translation with some cultivated Greek.

  “We’re in the process of consulting a woman in Palo Alto who specializes in placing students in foreign schools—sabbatical families and so on. She thinks she can find something appropriate,” Amy said.

  So—they were planning to send Gilda discreetly away. With this, Ursula saw her hopes fade of getting any help from Ran and Amy with Ian’s Stanford nightmare extortionate tuition of fifty thousand dollars. She renewed her mental resolve to track down Pud Aymes and put pressure on him to help with his son’s education. Why should she pay it all? Pud had been good about money when Ian was at Brown, but then one of his ventures—a silver mine?—had gone wrong. She had heard he had stayed in Argentina.

  Mrs. Thurber, the educational adviser, made inquiries in several directions, describing the special conditions under which a nice California girl from an affluent family would be needing a semester or quarter of high school in the tenth grade with the possibility of returning after a hiatus in the winter term. There was one complication that ought to be mentioned…

  Finally, Greece was not to be. In the end, Mrs. Thurber found a reassuring-sounding school in France, outside of Paris, in Saint-Cloud: Saint Ann’s British School. “Students will wear the uniform and follow the standard British curriculum and will sit the IGCSE examinations as a prequalification for British university and excellent academic preparation for the International Baccalaureate (IB) programme.”

  The idea of France was more reassuring than Greece to Ran; he knew several doctors there and after medical school had taken a stage in Paris on psoriasis with the famous dermatologue Rene Dubuque; and he had few worries about French obstetrics if something happened prematurely. If all went well, she would be coming home for the delivery, but if not, after all, France’s medicine was superior to that of the United States. If WHO statistics were to be believed, the U.S. had the worst maternal mortality in the industrialized world.

  Saint Ann’s British School had had to be convinced and paid extra to accept a pregnant girl and made clear it would never have done so had Gilda not been married, though it was also against their policy to accept marrie
d women, the legacy of a time when schoolteachers had presumably been virgins, when marriage implied knowledge of certain intimate things and conveyed a certain stain their students would feel clung to their teacher.

  But this was the modern era, and in today’s world, as married Mrs. Aymes she could not cause dismay. Curiosity maybe: If she was a wife, why wasn’t she at home somewhere being a wife? Was she a widow? A tragic scenario involving a military conflict? In some cultures, her age would not surprise; also the girl was American; and also, money talks.

  * * *

  —

  Ursula, who had never had a daughter, indulged her wish for one by projecting onto Gilda some of her idea of the fun of dressing a girl; and a wedding dress was the summit of maternal thrill. Of course she knew Gilda wouldn’t be wearing white or a veil—the ceremony would be low-key in the Motts’ garden with no one there—but Gilda should have a pretty dress at least. Ursula wasn’t sure about Amy Mott’s degree of interest in clothes or even whether she was really in her heart behind their collective decision about the marriage, but she included Amy in the invitation to go dress shopping and, to her surprise, Amy accepted.

  Amy and Gilda drove up to the city and met Ursula at the appointed hour in the designer dress department of Saks. There was a bridal department, too, but they didn’t want anything overtly brideish. Ursula found a little irritating Amy’s condescending air of being too fine for shopping, of never having been in Saks before, of always buying her clothes in Paris, or—judging from her clothes—not being interested in fashion at all. Which of these things accounted for her withdrawn silence, Ursula couldn’t decide. Maybe it was just her dismay at the circumstances, but Amy was saying very little, forcing Ursula into a real-estate saleswoman mode of bright encouragement as they rifled the racks and Ursula tried to divine what both Gilda and Amy were feeling, about the wedding, the baby, Ian, herself. Ursula found it hard to imagine that Gilda wasn’t delighted to be marrying her handsome son, but she was beginning to see the truth.

  At least Gilda was interested in the dresses like a normal girl, though her choices—the ones she chose to call to the attention of her mother and Ursula—were a bit jeune fille; of course she was a jeune fille.

  “Blue? That’s not a bit too bridesmaidy?” said Ursula. They had spurned the advances of the saleswoman, but when the woman kept hovering, Ursula brought her into the situation, explaining Gilda would be attending “a summer wedding in a garden,” not mentioning, of course, that this child was the bride.

  “What colors do you like, Gilda? You probably could wear any color,” the saleswoman agreed. “Your own—um—neutral coloring…”

  “I think I look good in black, but I guess that wouldn’t be appropriate.” Gilda said. Amy and Ursula exchanged an anguished glance to think of how close to the surface Gilda’s feelings were.

  “This is a mostly cotton dimity.” The saleswoman brought out a floating, longish dress in a shade between gray and lavender, sprigged with little green flowers. “Cool and pretty. It has a little polyester to keep it crisp.”

  “Okay, that’s great,” Gilda said. “Thanks.”

  “Try it on!” said the saleswoman, and tyrannically led Gilda to the dressing room, scandalized that the girl hadn’t meant even to see how it looked on her. Aura of shotgun here. Gilda came out to show her mother and Ursula; it did fit and suited her well enough, a little frilly but adequately bridal. Amy paid for it; but both Ursula and, apparently, Amy too felt the anticlimax of Gilda accepting the first dress she was shown. Gilda was thinking of the child brides of Africa, being decked out and painted red by bangled relatives in turbans who led them to their sacrifice.

  * * *

  —

  Amy didn’t keep her next appointment, one she had made with Adoption Services of San Francisco. One detail had not been addressed, the most difficult of all: What was to become of the baby? Ursula, it was clear, believed/hoped that the Motts would raise it, while she, one of its grandmothers, would pitch in with birthday parties and movie days. Ran would not hear of Amy’s similar plan; the baby was not coming to live with them. It would be a constant reproach to Gilda, and a subject of curiosity and gossip with all who knew them. The possibility of Carla claiming to be its mother, or even Amy herself, came up again and again, but Carla let it be known she was unwilling to shock and horrify her Catholic parents, let alone look after it. They discussed Julie, but didn’t ask her directly. Of course they could just face it down, let people talk.

  Gilda seemed indifferent to where the baby would live, and the more Amy thought about it, in fairness to the innocent newborn, it seemed imperative that they would take pains to find it a more attentive home. Amy broached the matter with Phil Train and with Gilda’s doctors. Ministers and doctors heard of cases, situations, opportunities—somebody’s baby dies, they need another to fill the empty cradle and mend the broken heart. Virtuous childless couples, too old to qualify at adoption agencies but loving and solvent. For the moment, neither Phil nor the doctors had any prospects.

  Amy, surreptitiously to avoid upsetting Ran and, for different reasons, Gilda, had begun discreet inquiries about adoption agencies. Amy quickly understood that public—civic or state—services were constrained by rules outlawing things like race or income.

  She read the websites of adoption agencies, looking for ones that maybe had a minimum income requirement and a high education stipulation. This she did not find. She did find that fathers had rights of custody above all if they were married to the mother, or if they had put their paternity in writing, and if they hadn’t abused the child or committed any of the revolting felonies detailed in the statutes. Did they have to fear that Ian Aymes would exercise his rights to take, or at least see the baby? What about Ursula?

  The websites did let you see videos about potential parents; you could sort by religion, race, job, region. Would she like the baby’s parents to be like her and Ran or unlike them in some adventurous way? She looked at one or two families, the ones who emerged when she put down her and Ran’s own characteristics: white Episcopalians who worked in IT (her) or biotech (Ran). Smiling younger faces came up, characterizing themselves as liking to do all the things she and Ran liked to do: ski, read, concerts, travel. Fawn and Rick. Davia and Matt. Were she and Ran issued from the same cookie cutter in the sky as these people?

  Would not a biracial couple, testimony to a certain amount of free-spirited independence, be better? Artists? Circus performers? None of the videos discussed people’s reading habits.

  She dropped the California and Episcopalian requirements, ran the program again, this time found more possibilities—fatter, sweeter people—a wrestling coach in Kansas and his choir director wife; Merry and Tom in Florida. Tom was Chinese. All the couples said the same things, about how much they loved kids, struggled with fertility, longed for a baby, all the fun they’d have. “Though we are not religious, per se, we value the ethical principles of Western civilization and the Golden Rule,” wrote Jeffrey and Karen.

  There were different ways of handing over the baby—at the hospital without the mother ever seeing it, letting her have it for a few days to adjust her milk; there was a time period she had during which she could change her mind. Adoption agents would be present at every meeting, by law.

  Amy saw that official adoption was not for them, not for her, and not for Gilda, at least not via bureaucracy and websites. That still left the question: What to do with the baby? But they still had months for something to suggest itself.

  39

  A course of action once decided, the sooner the better.

  The coming Saturday was chosen for the wedding, accommodating Phil Train’s need to be at a church convocation in Denver the following week. Amy couldn’t bring herself to think about a lunch or drinks for the dozen or so people who would have to be invited, counting Gilda’s half siblings Peggy and Hams and Misty; Donna; Ian’s a
unt Renny—Pud Aymes’s sister—who lived in Wyoming; Phil Train, of course, and Carla. Would it be cute to have Marcus and Manuel as ring bearers?

  For Amy and Ran, the whole thing was terrible, the ruin of their hopes for Gilda—hopes until now not even consciously formed. They had always had the expectation of an unusual destiny for her, the reward of her physical calvary; and she had so far seemed not to disappoint. Her intelligence and poise had always testified to her promise. But what would happen to her now? This marriage was a denouement, not a beginning. Not a happy ending, a tragedy. Why were they doing it to her? They couldn’t explain the vestigial docility that was making them make her conform to the world’s belief in marriage.

  On the Friday, the day before the wedding, Ursula showed up with a box of white cloth napkins from Gump’s—as if Amy didn’t have napkins—some silver saltshakers, and a wrapped present, also from Gump’s. This jarred Amy into a discussion with Carla about what they ought to be serving; she’d given it no thought. Champagne for sure, Carla objected, and some fancy sandwiches, not a real lunch. Or should they sit down to a real lunch? Ran, intruding, thought certainly sit down to something nice for lunch; as long as they were at it, nothing should be halfway. Important that they look back on it with pleasure, or at least not shame. There should be nothing bad to remember; that was the main consideration. He imagined the baby in later years looking at its parents’ wedding pictures, and it was important that the photographs be free of that retrospective tristesse that patinates old images in hindsight. He realized he’d fallen into Amy’s way of thinking.

  Photographs? That required a photographer. Normally at family events, Carla skulked around with an iPhone, but tomorrow she’d be too busy. Maybe they should skip the photos, which could be thought of as endorsements. The same with music, but maybe a few notes of Lohengrin all the same?