Lorna Mott Comes Home

by Diane Johnson

  “Formidable,” Armand said.

  “One picture sold would keep us very nicely for quite a while.”

  “Toi et moi, comme avant.”

  “Yes,” said Lorna.

  “I had a great blow to my amour-propre today,” he said after a bit. “I was chatting with one of the pretty nurses at the hospital, and as I stepped away, I heard her say to another girl, in English, ‘He considers himself quite the swain.’ She might as well have said, How ridiculous he is, that old fat guy.”

  Lorna understood that this confidence must indeed have cost him something, and also that it was meant to reassure her about the future. Armand was superior to most men in understanding himself, she thought. She laughed. “I find you very attractive,” she said.

  “ ‘Swain.’ I looked it up, not a common English word, a little note of mockery in it.”

  “Yes,” Lorna agreed.

  53

  In the hospital cafeteria, Julie and Carla, Amy and Ran, were having dinner. The canard à l’orange was excellent, for institutional food, also the choux de Bruxelles. For the holidays the hospital had found some kitschy American Santas for the tables and put a tree in one corner, with “Mon Beau Sapin, Roi de Forêts” and “Adeste Fideles” playing on a loop. Otherwise, it would have been easy to forget that it was the holidays.

  “So, Julie, what are your plans?” Julie’s grandfather Ran asked her, after they had talked over the astonishing events of the last two days. Julie had had a fearful sense, from the scrutiny her grandfather was giving her, that she was going to be drafted to look after Pomona, or even asked to claim her as her own child. Either she or Carla was to be the designated mother; it was obvious.

  “I could have a job with this English member of Parliament, if I decide to do that. And I plan to finish my UC–Sciences Po course on urbanism in Paris, which doesn’t finish until July,” she answered.

  “Does this give you your BA?” Ran asked.

  “I’ll have to do at least one more semester in Berkeley, maybe two,” Julie said, “but I don’t know if I want to do it right now. Wouldn’t it be better to get the European experience now that I’m here?”

  Carla apparently had the same fear for herself of being co-opted for Pomona’s care and broke in, “I plan to stay, too. I’m moving in with Slobodin and I’ll finish my French course.” Since Slobodin, whoever that was, hadn’t penetrated their consciousness, they were startled before remembering he was her companion from French class.

  “Then I’ll do accounting, which can’t be much different in French. Account, compte. They have a business school in Fontainebleau directed to international practices. You’re supposed to already have an MBA to be accepted, but Bodi has connections there and can fix it so that my experience at Mott and Company will count.”

  Amy and Ran gaped, stunned, unable to grasp the idea of losing Carla, who had never been absent if she was needed, especially when it was Gilda who needed her, for the last fifteen years. Ran saw the moral problem with asking any more of Carla, but he wasn’t sure Amy did, and shook his head in warning when she started to plead.

  * * *

  —

  Later, in her room back at the house in Pont-les-Puits, Julie was writing an email to Ian, the first in a few weeks. She had before her mind’s eye a vivid image of naked Ian, looking like Apollo Sauroktonos, a favorite Praxiteles statue newly familiar from her visits to the Louvre. With a shiver of desire, she told herself some things are hard to give up—for instance making love with Ian—but at last she knew where her priorities were: finishing her degree, getting on in international relations. She wanted to stay in Europe. She was surprised that Carla did, too.

  Dear Ian,

  I thought you’d want to know that Gilda’s baby arrived early but seems to be doing well. Weighed just under three pounds and there’s some talk that because a common condition might develop that so far hasn’t, they’ll airlift her tomorrow to a bigger center in Lyon. She’s in an incubator. She’s called Pomona, like the California city, which seems odd to me, but who am I…? Right now, she’s in Valence, France, at the Centre Hospitalier de Valence, if you want to call. I should be back in Paris soon.

  I probably won’t be coming back to California for the spring semester as I have a temp job here and also want to finish my course that I’m taking here in the Berkeley extension, so it will count toward my degree. I don’t know when the Motts plan to come home.

  I think of you often and hope you will always be my friend.

  Love,

  Julie

  Would he think that tone somewhat cold? She did wonder if he had met anyone new at Stanford, and if they were doing it, but she could hardly object. Her tears ran as she was writing, and by the end she was sobbing frankly and gave herself over to the sad beauty of life.

  * * *

  —

  “Mother,” said Ian on the telephone to Ursula. “Let me read you this.” He read her Julie’s email.

  “You must go there immediately,” Ursula said. “It would be unnatural not to do so. What if something goes wrong and you haven’t seen the little thing, your own—what? What was it? Pomona?”

  Ian reread Julie’s letter for pronouns. “A girl named Pomona.” He liked the name. He had a friend who went to Pomona College, in Claremont.

  “Oh, God,” said Ursula. “The darling. Would they send us a photo? I’ll see to the plane tickets. You’ll miss a week of classes but never mind that, this is a unique lifetime experience. Your child needs to see you, like a little duckling, needs to bond with you.”

  “I know,” Ian said. “But where are they, actually? I know they’re in Valence, France. We should probably fly to Lyon,” looking at a map on his phone. “That’s where they’ll be.”

  54

  Sometimes, though rarely, things sort themselves out.

  Ran and Lorna were sitting in the waiting room on the pediatric floor of the Centre Hospitalier de Valence while Pomona was being readied for an airlift by helicopter to Lyon, where they had more specialized facilities in the case of complications common for very low-birth-weight babies. Amy had gone to the roof to help, and she was expecting to fly with the baby and Gilda. It struck Lorna all at once that it was funny—both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar—and she laughed out loud.

  “What?” Ran asked.

  “Well, the two of us here, in really a pretty godforsaken part of France, waiting for a helicopter. Three of us, counting Amy—both of your wives—and also our progeny; you’re quite the patriarch. Things unforeseen.”

  “Four of us with Armand-Loup,” Ran said.

  “Certainly. Four of us. The new extended family. It feels good, France. It feels like home to me, I lived here a long time.”

  “What about San Francisco? You lived there a long time, too.”

  “I’m not sure I fit back in; but I do feel like I can say a couple of things to you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Now you’re going to go crazy about this baby—we all will—but really both Hams and Peggy need…you could do more for them. I would if only I could.”

  “I’ve talked to Hams. They’re buying their house.”

  “Then Peggy. I don’t know. Her life needs a jolt. She’s liking Thailand.”

  “I know that, I’m paying for her trip, and I must say, she’s living it up.”

  “Really? Good. How?”

  “Luxury hotel and a lot of room service. And spa service. The hotel bills come directly to us.”

  “I hope she isn’t taking advantage of you,” Lorna said. They had certainly taught Peggy not to spend other people’s money self-indulgently. Then they both laughed to think of puritan Peggy, who had sometimes as a child refused to have new shoes if she thought she didn’t need them, now going mad with extravagance in Bangkok.

  “I was thin
king of you getting behind some business venture of hers, something to spring her out of Ukiah. Silk jackets—has she written you?”

  “Not about jackets, but I suppose she will.”

  Lorna dared to ask another thing that was uppermost in her heart: “Is the baby going to make it?”

  “Probably. Yes, certainly. French medicine is very sophisticated.”

  “What does the father of this wonder baby say? Who is the father?” Lorna wondered, changing the subject.

  “Ursula Aymes’s boy. I suppose he should know the baby is here. I don’t know that he and Gilda are in touch. Gilda’s mind is on Tacitus and Cicero.”

  “I can write Ursula,” Lorna offered. “We’re friendly. She’ll be thrilled.”

  “Ursula is one more complication,” Ran said. On his telephone a text message he had barely had time to absorb, from Ursula: “Arriving Lyon tomorrow, please instruct.”

  “Where is Pomona going to live?”

  “Where do you think?” Ran said. “Did you see Amy look at the baby, her expression?” Lorna had seen Amy’s gaze of love. Seeing this was a sensitive topic, Lorna suggested, “Shouldn’t we go see them off on the helicopter?”

  “No, I couldn’t stand watching, I’m afraid of helicopters,” Ran said. “I’d rather not. Amy knows. I’m taking the train to Lyon tomorrow—it’s only forty-five minutes.”

  How unlike a man to admit a fear, Lorna thought.

  * * *

  —

  Falling asleep alone that night in the Hôtel La Périchole, having heard that his loved ones were safe in Lyon, Ran nonetheless had the rowboat anxiety dream: He is in the rowboat, but now it’s a motorboat, with just him, no, he and Amy and Gilda and now, um, Pomona. An immense ocean liner, looming like a huge white orca, has almost hit them. A collision is averted, but the liner has disabled them some way, swamped them, and disabled their motor. Ran and Amy wave desperately for help, but the liner pulls away, braying arrogantly from its huge steam stacks, and strands them helpless in the endless sea. Ran has to stand on tiptoe and hold the baby’s basket high above his head to keep it out of the water, hold it till his arms ache. He has to hold it forever. He sees Lorna waving at him from the deck of the liner, but he cannot read her expression, whether gloating or friendly?

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks, as at other times, to John Beebe, Robert Gottlieb, Lynn Nesbit, Victoria Wilson, and the patient friends who read sections or all of a work in progress. And to my late husband, John Murray, who had lots of good suggestions and laughed in the right places; and to my friend the late Alison Lurie, who felt that the people were a bit too preoccupied with money. The mistakes are mine alone—in French, in geography, in obstetrical expertise, and more.

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