Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “They said I could come in. There’s the baby!” She peered into the incubator, her face contorted into something between tears and joy.

  “I’m supposed to wear her like a kangaroo.”

  “I’ve heard about that, it helps them. Babies.” Carla then remembered what she wanted to ask Gilda. “Gilda, sweetie, the tattoo. When did you get that?”

  “Bookney and I got them after a Circle of Faith meeting once.”

  “Your parents will not like it.”

  “I guess they have bigger things to worry about now,” Gilda said, coming out from behind the curtain wearing the awkward purple hospital gown, and the nurse helped her back into the bed. Just then Lorna rushed in with Gilda’s backpack. Gilda wondered if Mrs. Dumas had described herself as her grandmother, which she wasn’t really.

  * * *

  —

  Think what the girl had been through. Lorna admired this valiant child, and was certainly relieved to see the tiny lump of baby sleeping quietly in the incubator, attached reassuringly to monitors and breathing devices, which would surely sound an alarm if all was not well? The room was dark and cell-like, monasterial but noisy, mops clanging, cleaning apparatuses and carts wheeling up and down the corridors and, in the adjacent rooms, bells going off. “Here’s your backpack,” she told Gilda. “What do you need? I’ll tell them.”

  Gilda opened her backpack and fished stuff out of it—a vial, a plastic box, some tubing. She opened the box and popped a lozenge into her mouth. “Thanks so much, Mrs. Dumas, I didn’t know how to ask for anything,” she said. “I don’t know the word for diabetes.”

  “Diabète,” Lorna said. She’d given up trying to call Ran and Amy, who seemed to exist permanently in a zone not covered by a signal, though she’d been able to leave one message when she seemed to be connected to their voice mail.

  * * *

  —

  It was true they’d been in a series of dead zones.

  When Amy and Ran finally got on the Air France morning flight, SFO–Paris CDG, they knew only that Gilda might be in labor. When they landed in Paris Saturday around nine, they couldn’t get her on her cell phone. They went directly to the Gare de Lyon for a train to Valence and planned to drive from there to Pont-les-Puits.

  It seemed hard to believe that there would be places in civilized modern France where you couldn’t reach someone on a cell phone, but they could get neither Julie nor Carla on their phones and had no idea where they were.

  “It’s the same in, I don’t know, Idaho, probably,” Ran said.

  “Montana.”

  “Puglia, remember that time in Italy?”

  On the train to Valence, they still had had no luck reaching anybody, and continued in tortured ignorance, knowing only from one hurried text message that the baby had been born.

  51

  Once in Valance, they rented a Citroën SUV in the Valence station and instructed the GPS, which spoke to them in French. They didn’t know how to change her language but à droit, à gauche, it was simple enough. Amy drove and Ran manned the cell phone, trying at ten-minute intervals to reach Gilda or Carla. “Why is there GPS but no cell-phone service?” he fretted.

  According to the GPS, it was fewer than a hundred kilometers to Pont-les-Puits, but would take almost two hours on the small roads. They decided to check the Valence hospitals before heading for Pont. There were several, so they started with the biggest. The phone in Valence worked fine; their French well enough: “Was there a young woman admitted, having a baby? Do you have a new patient in the OB ward? Service obstétrique?”

  “Attendez, je vais demander.”

  At the first hospital they called, apparently the main hospital, they learned with joy that a young American had been admitted on the maternity ward lately. Perhaps still there but being readied for transfer. They typed in the address and started on the route GPS directed them. “They didn’t mention about the baby,” Amy said. “Why would they transfer her?” That could mean out of danger or needing special treatment. The ambiguity was chilling. Was the baby born, was it okay, was it even Gilda?

  “They wouldn’t transfer someone really sick,” Ran said.

  * * *

  —

  In the waiting room, there were no magazines, just an old auction catalog from Paris, which Lorna appropriated and read fitfully; the auction sale was of amateurish watercolors with one or two more accomplished painters sweetening the others, all to be sold, or had been sold. Someone had penciled in some prices in the margins. Nothing on Woods’s level; still, Lorna studied the suggested opening bids; she needed to be conversant with the art market. She was alone; Carla was sitting with Gilda, and Armand had gone for Gilda’s clothes and personal items for her transfer to a hospital in Lyon, where the baby would receive specialized neonatal care.

  She became aware of excited voices in the hall, and then heard the double doors to the hallway and then the door behind her opening, American voices, one familiar—the man. She turned and saw it was Ran. Well, Gilda’s father. She felt thankful he was there—he had always made her and other people feel taken care of, a physician’s skill. Even if they couldn’t get along, he made her feel safe. The young woman—youngish—must be Amy, Gilda’s mother. Despite herself, Lorna felt a little flutter of some emotion she couldn’t characterize. She got up; they rushed toward her.

  “Is she here?” Ran asked.

  “Yes, in a room, and the baby, but they’re being flown to Lyon very soon.”

  “Amy, this is Lorna,” he said to his wife.

  To Lorna’s surprise, the woman seized her in a hug, saying, “Thank you, thank you.” Amy was thin as a model and had shoulder-length dark hair, like a girl, but up close, she looked her age, in her fifties, with the beginnings of crow’s-feet and fine lines above her lip. Why was Lorna even thinking about Amy’s age?

  “Show us where to go,” Ran said. No one impeded them passing the nurses’ station and heading down the neon-lit corridor beyond. Gilda’s was the first room. There was Gilda, in her hospital gown, sitting stuck on a chair, apparently tethered to the incubator, her chin sunk on her chest, asleep, her strange silver hair in oily strings. They were stricken into silence. Tiptoeing in, Lorna, Ran, and Amy gathered to stare into the incubator, where a little being in its undershirt lay breathing. The incubator made a low thunking and wheezing sound, as if it were magnifying its own heartbeat and breath. A sharp whiff of hospital antiseptic scented the room.

  “Oh God,” Amy whispered, voice tremulous, overcome by the sights of baby and Gilda. The nurse, standing in the door behind them, beckoned to them to come out, and she stepped in to do something to the machine.

  Gilda stirred and opened her eyes. Lorna’s own eyes shot with tears to see the girl’s joy when she realized her parents were there. When she lifted her hands, they saw one was pasted with needles and a tube. Ran and Amy embraced her carefully so as not to dislodge them. “Je suis la mère,” Amy said piteously to the nurse, who was trying to stop them from staying.

  “Did you see her?” Gilda said. “She’s three pounds.”

  “I need to talk to the doctor,” Ran said. “Have you seen the doctor, Gilda?”

  “No. Yes, I guess there was a man in here, who worked the machine. I need some more glucose, though.” Ran nodded and left the room. In the hall, he found a man, not a doctor, someone he’d not met but who was somehow familiar, carrying some clothes. This guy was his own height, substantial, with curly, graying hair and a cherubic, handsome, merry face. They nodded at each other and, as the man started toward Gilda’s room, Ran realized he was probably Armand the Frenchman, the person Lorna had married. He caught his arm. “Ran Mott,” he said. “Is that Gilda’s stuff?”

  “Ah, oui, yes,” Armand said, smiling. “Le papa de Gilda? Armand Dumas.” They shook hands perfunctorily, Armand handed Ran the clothing, and Ran rushed
to give it to Gilda. It was not her dress, it was her diabetes that worried him. In a hospital, they normally would have cut back her insulin during the birth, but if her insulin pump had continued to work throughout the childbirth process, she would have received too much of it. But he found her alert, luckily not going into insulin shock.

  “Honey, did you ask them for glucose?” Ran asked as he rummaged in her backpack for her glucose.

  “Mrs. Dumas brought me my tablets. I wasn’t sure how to ask in French,” Gilda said. “Just now, dreaming, I guess, I dreamed that I was a doctor. I must have been dreaming about you, some sort of ESP.”

  * * *

  —

  The pediatrician from Paris had recommended that Pomona and Gilda be transferred to a neonatal unit in Lyon, and it was scheduled by helicopter around noon the following day. “I will feel better,” the pediatrician assured them, “when the child has breathing apparatus at hand.” Though this delay condemned them, in turn, to a night of panicked vigilance, they were relieved to do something.

  Ran was a little shaken by Gilda’s detachment about the baby. He was also shaken on account of what he had seen when Amy looked at Pomona, this little blob in an incubator. It was a change in her expression, some combination of tenderness and ferocious focus he remembered her having when Gilda was born, the look of Madonnas in certain paintings, haloed by the intensity of love for the baby, bonding. He saw even more clearly his own future of diaper pong and preschools and worry about teenaged driving and college applications—phases Gilda hadn’t even got to yet, now to be prolonged by this new person that Amy would never give up.

  52

  Life more often than not defies our wishes.

  In San Francisco, an unfamiliar voice answered the telephone at Amy and Ran’s Woodside house, and to Ursula’s fury and anxiety explained that the Motts were abroad. The voice, some maid or gardener, refused to disclose anything more; for Ursula, the Motts had disappeared; there was no trace of them or news of Gilda and the precious grandchild she was carrying, or of anyone who could tell her anything. Ian knew not much more than she, though he got emails from Gilda from time to time and could reassure his mother that all was well with the mother of his child at least as of the week before Christmas. He volunteered to email Gilda immediately for an update on her condition.

  “She has a couple more months, remember,” he said.

  “How can they let her bat around the world like this?” Ursula stormed. “They must be over there with her. Maybe there’s a problem. No, they’d bring her back, I’m sure. What does she say?”

  “I just now sent the email,” Ian said.

  “If she has that baby over there, we have to go over there,” Ursula said.

  “Mother, it’s not till March.” In fact, Ian was not entirely sure that when the baby came anyone would tell them. How would they even find out? Maybe Gilda would toss them an email. He’d see what she responded to the friendly inquiry he’d just sent. Ursula, unable to resist some adorable baby clothes she’d seen at Saks, had already laid in four pairs of tiny white kidskin shoes and a little cap-and-sweater set hand-knitted in Portugal on teeny needles in soft gender-neutral green.

  So much to look forward to! And recently she had begun dating the Very Reverend Phil Train, who found her a very nice, principled woman, as well as good-looking. He respected and appreciated her inquiry into the attitudes of the Church about abortion, and her concern for the baby expected by the Motts. He took her to the symphony and they had started having dinner at least once a week, and who knew what might develop? He planned to see how she would fit into, and if she would enjoy, some of the social functions at the cathedral.

  * * *

  —

  Peggy, sitting on the balcony of her room at the Peninsula Hotel, looking out over the polluted air of Bangkok, was remembering some words of Curt’s. “It’s how we live now,” he had said, meaning Americans scattered around the world, and Peggy’d thought that didn’t really apply to her, someone stuck in Ukiah—but why shouldn’t it apply to her? Julie was grown now, Julie her initial reason for staying put for the reliable school system. Now she, Peggy, could stay in Thailand like Curt if she pleased, or any other place, as long as she could swing it. Sell dog collars to the Thai or, for that matter, sell something Thai to Americans. Curt could advise her. Say the charming jackets in Thai silk she had particularly liked in that strong teal color, though the magenta was good, too. She indulged a transient fantasy of living in a suite at the Peninsula, or in some lovely cottage on stilts like you saw here, running an import-export business; though if it were easy, why wouldn’t everyone do it?

  Visions of possibilities, newly released from the prison of Ukiahan reality, floated through her mind in different forms—silk jackets, dog collars, studying Thai dance, no, she was too tall, studying it in the scholarly sense, then; making a film about Thai dance. Curt had taken her to a performance of dancers and shadow puppets with mean faces and the ability to turn their hands completely around on their wrists. She’d find some craft based on the iconography of Thai dance. She could write a book about it. To live, she could import the beautiful, amazingly inexpensive silk jackets. Well, she’d be here, so she’d be exporting them. It wouldn’t hurt to talk to the people at the place that sold silk, Jim Thompson; maybe they’d need a representative. She might have to modify the design of the Thai jackets to fit Californians, who were bustier and broader in the shoulders. Misty could handle the California end, now that she was feeling better.

  She’d felt for a while that her Internet purse-resale business was a little too hands-on, too small-scale, too mumsy. Her mind happily whirred on. Could she get her father to put up some money for a start-up? She was thinking about whether she could live permanently at the Peninsula by renting out her Ukiah house, but the economics didn’t work. Who would want to live in Ukiah, even in her tidy, pretty little house?

  For lunch, she ordered a couple of items from room service—sweetened tofu flower with ginkgo and water chestnuts, and double-boiled sea conch and morel in chicken broth. She was working her way through the alluring dishes in the several restaurants of the hotel—Thai, Chinese, and European—and today was on to the Chinese menu. Curt was joining her tonight for Thai, bringing his “new friend,” Samar. She couldn’t tell from the name what gender Samar would turn out to be—the language so difficult. She had to write down the names of the Thai dishes to remember if she had already had them: tom yum goong mae-nam or poo-nim thod ka-prao grob.

  * * *

  —

  Lorna, at the Pâtisserie Friandise, felt strangely happy. The successful delivery of Pomona. The family. Maybe there was something aphrodisiac about the aroma of bread, cookies, cake, but it was fun being there with Armand-Loup. Lorna had always liked men categorically, their large bodies and deep voices fascinated her, just as biology intended. She admired their intellects, their application to professions and skills, and the gullible but brave docility with which they accepted being sent to war. She admired philosophers. She had not had any really bad experiences with men, nothing she couldn’t deal with.

  Well, two failed relationships; but that was a reflection on her, she thought, on her judgment, not on an entire species. Did she like Armand particularly or as a member of the larger category “husband”? She liked him particularly, especially when she was with him. Her reasons for leaving him seemed less urgent after them laughing a lot through a satisfying dinner of quiche, ris de veau, salade, and a good Bordeaux. She’d been silly and impulsive.

  At the hospital that afternoon, Lorna had had another epiphany. It was to do with the way the nurses smiled at Armand. She suddenly saw that women could not resist smiling at him, no matter if he smiled back, though he usually did. Women smiled first! Was it his somewhat-cherubic, boyish face, even at this age rosy and dimpled like a cherub on a painted ceiling? Was it just some pheromone he exuded? She tho
ught of the photographer woman showing him around San Francisco. She thought of some other episodes. Maybe it was not all his fault; he was, after all, just naturally amiable; it was his nature to oblige with the things women suggested for him.

  * * *

  —

  It was at dinner at La Roulette last night that she had floated her idea: she’d decided not to go back to California, or rather only for a while from time to time, and to spend more time in Pont with him, and she hoped he would get their house back. They’d been so happy there. She watched in suspense for his reaction.

  He wasn’t surprised at her giving up California, as if he’d expected it all the time. “We were happy here, Lo. I don’t imagine you there in San Francisco.” He didn’t mention a divorce-in-process. She finally asked whether he had actually filed the papers.

  “I did, but I always hoped we would not need them. About renting out the house, though, I need the money, alas,” he said. “My retirement pension doesn’t cover keeping it, heating it—but maybe you will get some lecture fees.” They lapsed into a familiar discussion of their shaky but possible finances, and what other measures they might take: bed-and-breakfast, scenic tours. Things they had never been able to agree on had come to seem like the start of an adventure.

  “Well, but the Woodses!” Lorna had almost forgotten; her potential agent fees hadn’t yet penetrated her sense of her situation, hadn’t conferred the deep feeling of security they should.

  “Voilà,” said Armand-Loup. “Dix percent?”

  “Armand, that’ll be thousands right there. The last Woods I looked up, the asking price was a million five, that is, the starting price; it was at auction. I don’t know what the final selling price was.”