He placed his chair back against the wall with an orderliness that delighted Jeanne’s heart.
“I’ll be flying between San Francisco and Tokyo from now until Christmas.” He handed Jeanne his business card. “You can always reach me at that number. If I’m not available, my secretary can find me. I’ll tell her to put through any calls from you right away.”
He stopped and pointed out the window at three boys lugging buckets across the front lawn for the school. “What are they doing?”
Jeanne walked around her desk and stood beside him. “We’ve been in a drought for the last three years, and we’ve learned to save water any way we can. Last year we issued a bucket for every shower stall and the boys fill them with the warm-up water. Rather than waste that water letting it run down the drain, the boys are assigned particular plants around the school to water. Thanks to them, the basic shrubbery and the rose cloister that was here when my parents bought the school have never looked better.”
She saw that Simon Weed approved of this.
“It’s another example of the Hilltop Method, Mr. Weed. Facing facts and making the best of reality whether it’s pleasant or not.”
Simon Weed looked at her with admiration.
Jeanne felt herself blush and became suddenly shy. “Credit my father and husband. Most of the good ideas come from them.”
“I was hoping I could meet Dr. Tate.”
“He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
Simon Weed pointed to the framed diploma on the wall between the window and the office door. “You went to graduate school at Columbia, I see.”
“In the dark ages, yes.”
“My wife was there too.”
A frisson of anxiety tightened Jeanne’s back.
“Journalism.”
“It’s a wonderful department,” she said, moving toward the door.
“I knew your husband had a Ph.D. but I didn’t know you did. Was that mentioned in the brochure?”
“No,” Jeanne said. She put her hand on his shoulder, eased him out of the office. “A printer’s error. We didn’t catch it in time.”
In the hall Simon Weed said, “I’ll miss him.”
Jeanne saw that he meant it, and knew that despite his disadvantages, Adam Weed was a fortunate child. So many of the parents who brought their boys to Hilltop couldn’t wait to be rid of them and back to their own lives. Jeanne watched these parents as they left her office. She watched them through the window, climbing into their illegally parked BMWs and Land Rovers, speaking into cell phones, poking at their small computers.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “Try not to worry.”
She watched him walk away and returned to her office. She saw he had left his driving gloves on her desk. Absently, she slipped the gloves on and held her hands before her, turning them slowly palm to back to palm again. She held them to her face and inhaled the smell of leather and worn-in dirt and Simon Weed. She imagined they were still warm from his hands.
In the bottom drawer of her bedside table, Jeanne kept another pair of gloves wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a length of frayed pink hair ribbon. Those gloves were not expensive like Simon Weed’s, not hand stitched of supple leather, not meant for driving. They had a yellowed fleece lining and were intended to warm a young man’s hands on a frigid Berkeley afternoon when a wet wind from the northwest scoured the streets. Across the leather palms dark stains marked the leather leash of a yellow Lab, all muscle and high spirits and determined to drag the man—a graduate student—down the street to the patch of green the neighborhood called a park.
Jeanne had traced her son on-line and been surprised by how easy it was to run down the whereabouts of an adopted child. Perhaps if she had known how quickly and almost casually this could be accomplished with the help of the Internet, she would not have had the courage to try. But on a rainy afternoon, working late and finding it impossible to concentrate on the monthly report to the board, she had finally done what had occurred to her a hundred times before. Why had she called up her search engine and typed in adoption search on that particular day? Maybe she had been feeling lonely or nostalgic or regretful. Maybe Teddy had been more difficult than usual. She could not remember; it didn’t matter. She had done it, begun the process; and Jeanne rarely stopped something once she’d started it. The search for her son became her own exciting secret.
To find him so close, fifty miles to the north, practically a neighbor . . . She had not been sure what she felt then. Gladness, relief, a new dread to add to the others?
For a time it had been possible to put James, now called Mark, out of her mind. She had that kind of mind; it did as it was told. But she dreamed of him sometimes and there were boys at Hilltop whose names and faces tweaked her memory. According to the tracer’s report he had graduated from NYU and become a graduate student at UC. But what did he study? And what kind of personality did he have? Was he funny, impatient, thoughtful? The strong silent type or garrulous and talkative? Not married, the report said. But maybe in love? Gay or straight?
One afternoon she told Teddy she had an appointment in San Jose and left school early. She drove to Berkeley and parked outside the tiny bungalow where her son lived. She had no particular intention, and in this her behavior was so completely unlike her that if Hannah or Liz had heard about it they would have declared the story fiction. Logical Jeanne. Orderly Jeanne. Jeanne who would not tolerate loose ends or indecision parked her car in front of the house and turned off the ignition. She wrapped herself in her heavy wool coat and scrunched down behind the wheel like a private investigator in a film noir. She found the NPR affiliate station but turned it off after a few minutes. The talk intruded. If I am going to do something as peculiar and risky as this, she thought, I want to do it with full concentration.
After a while a man came out of the house leading a dog on a leash. He wore a navy blue parka and a black watch cap tugged down to cover his ears. Absolutely, this was her son. The glimpse she had of his handsome profile was like sighting Teddy at twenty. If someone had told her this was not her James she would have fought to prove it was.
She uttered a choking cry and began to weep.
The Lab tugged on the leash like a comic book dog, dragging its complaining, laughing master after him. The sound of the young man’s voice thrilled Jeanne. He turned into the park. She wiped her eyes, got out of the car and followed him. It was cold. Her damp face stung and her hands trembled. She shoved them deep in the pockets of her coat.
The park had a jungle gym, a soggy sandbox, a few benches and a picnic table with an overturned trash can beside it. James/Mark unhooked the Lab’s leash. The dog took off after the birds pecking at the trash can, got distracted and started digging in the trash himself.
“Rontu,” James/Mark called. “Get outa there.”
Rontu ignored him and grabbed a fried chicken box and shook it, scattering bones and papers around.
“Jesus Christ,” the young man yelled. “Goddamn son of a bitch. Sit, Rontu, goddamn sit!”
The dog looked up and dutifully sat, head hung low. James/Mark laughed and rubbed its ears, murmuring something. Jeanne couldn’t hear him; but she knew he was saying, “Good dog, good dog.”
James/Mark leashed the dog again, took a plastic bag from his pocket and removed his gloves, tossed them on the picnic table. With his hand in the plastic bag he picked up the mess Rontu had made. Neat, Jeanne thought. And responsible. My son. She thought her chest might burst with pleasure. She wanted to help him but the fear he would recognize her held her back. Was there a son and mother recognition gene? What would she say? How would she explain? If he knew the true story he would never forgive her.
James/Mark righted the trash can and turned away, walking toward the far side of the park. Jeanne thought it would look too obvious if she followed him. He would turn and look closely at her and then, the possibility of recognition. She watched his straight back and long strides all the way across the park. Wh
en he turned the corner out of sight, she sat down at the picnic table and held her face in her hands.
This was her son and Teddy’s. And she had been right to give him up. She could see immediately that his adopted parents had done a fine job of raising him. Look how wonderfully well he had turned out: an intelligent and responsible man with a sense of humor.
Better than we could have done.
Beside her elbow, his gloves. She picked them up and looked across the park where she had hoped to see him return. If he did she would say: You left your gloves. And he would grin and say, Yeah, thanks. No, he might see the similarity in their eyes or high cheekbones. Worse, he could recall her voice from his infancy. She had sung him a lullaby her grandmother taught her: Stay little wave, stay little wave, Shy one stay on the shore.
She slipped her hands inside the gloves and walked back to the car wearing them and crossed the street to lay them on the bungalow’s square porch where he would find them. But at the edge of the ragged lawn she stopped, turned back to the car and drove home.
It wasn’t stealing. James/Mark was her son, her blood. And Jeanne had always appropriated items belonging to the people she cared about. Cuff links from her father’s dresser. A neatly folded, embroidered handkerchief from her mother’s purse. Not to use, to hoard and hide. When Hannah’s daughter, Ingrid, was born Jeanne took a little ribbon headband, pink and pale yellow, the quintessence of femininity for a bald-headed baby girl. A frivolous thing. But it had relieved the anger and envy Jeanne felt whenever she thought of Hannah and her newborn.
Now she touched her cheek with Simon Weed’s gloves. The leather was soft as baby skin. She felt no envy for Simon Weed. Nothing about him made her angry, nor did she want power over him. Jeanne didn’t know why she wanted his gloves but it was not in her character to dissect and microanalyze motives. She wanted them. She would put them in her desk where she could sometimes take them out and slip them on. If he came back for them they would be there, but he was a rich man. A pair of worn gloves meant nothing to him.
Jeanne went into the office adjoining hers and told the school secretary, Ann Vickery, that she was going home before taking her lunch with the boys in the dining hall.
“Simon Weed forgot his gloves,” she said. “They’re in my top drawer if he calls.”
Teddy refused to eat the school food but the presence of one or the other of them was expected in the dining room. Today was Thursday; she was scheduled to sit with the eight-year-olds and watch them drip ketchup down their chins. She left the administration building by a side door.
Though larger now, with a new gymnasium and outdoor amphitheater, Hilltop School was not much changed from the days when Jeanne and Liz and Hannah—nine or ten at the time—hid in the bushes outside the dorms and spied on the boys undressing. Or when, a few years later, they shared a crush on a senior-school boy whose father was a famous movie star. Jeanne’s parents, Wade and Vera Hendrickson, had bought the land and buildings during the war from a departing religious order for—as Jeanne’s father always said with smirky cleverness—a hymn. The old buildings were of stone and stucco with heavy tile roofs; and though Hilltop was decidedly nondenominational, an atmosphere of latent Romanism clung to the place in the form of religious arcana cut in the arches and windows and doors of the older buildings. Here and there along the paths that unified the forty-acre grounds, stone slabs had been sunk between the flagstones and etched with pious Latin phrases. What had once been a chapel was now called simply the Meeting House, but the stained glass windows and carved Stations of the Cross contradicted the plain Yankee name.
Jeanne remembered Hilltop’s lean years when her parents taught every subject themselves and borrowed money to keep the school open. Nowadays Jeanne turned away dozens of prospective students for lack of space. According to the Hilltop Method, small classes were essential to good schooling—as were facing facts, standards of responsibility, and teaching boys to start at the beginning and move forward logically, step by step, sticking to the task until completed. A strong work ethic, Wade Hendrickson had often said, was more important than a college education.
It wasn’t a sophisticated pedagogical theory; in the Sixties and Seventies it had been derided as backward and stifling. But with the back-to-basics movement, Hilltop had actually become trendy. It didn’t hurt that Hilltop had the test scores and bank balance to prove its method worked.
Jeanne crossed the yellowed lawn to the flagstone path that entered the walled rose garden and divided the one hundred plants into concentric circles, a kind of simple labyrinth where once, Jeanne supposed, the nuns in their floating robes had strolled, whispering their rosaries. They had left behind, trapped within the walls, a meditative calm. In the midst of the garden crouched a lion-footed stone bench. She stopped beside it a moment and inhaled the fragrance of the blooms. Ragged Robin, Eglantine, Damask Rose, Etoile d’Hollande: she loved the old-fashioned names and blowsy cabbage blossoms that reminded her of buxom old ladies in silk. The roses in the cloister bloomed while the grass outside the wall yellowed and died.
In a photo taken when she was six or seven, still in pigtails, of course, and a dress with puffed sleeves—didn’t all little-girl dresses have puffed sleeves in those days?—her brother Michael stands at her side, his hand on her shoulder. He is so much taller than she, her head only reaches the middle of his chest.
Jeanne clearly remembered the occasion of the photo. Seconds before her father snapped it, she had been whining because her organdy dress scratched her arms and neck. The old black-and-white photo still shows, just above Jeanne’s smile, the slight shadow on one cheek where her mother slapped her.
Teddy and Jeanne’s home lay beyond the rose garden and through a hedge of pink oleander bushes that loved the drought. The single story frame-and-stucco house had been designed in what used to be called California ranch style. Judging from the French chateaux and Elizabethan fortresses now being built in the hills around Rinconada, the California ranch style was currently out of favor. But Jeanne loved the house and could walk through it blindfolded, for apart from college and the years when she and Teddy were in Manhattan, this house with its deep-silled, shuttered windows and cool rooms was the only one she had ever lived in. She walked toward the sound of a television blaring.
On the bed, Teddy Tate silenced the TV with the remote.
“If your head hurts, you shouldn’t watch the set. It’s a strain on your eyes.” Jeanne went into the bathroom and came out brushing her shoulder length brown hair. “I think you should see a doctor. There’s medicine for a sinus condition.” She twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.
“You look like a schoolmarm,” Teddy said.
“That’s what I am.”
“Wear your contacts.”
“The air’s too dry.”
“You’re a good-looking woman, Jeanne. Why don’t you do something with yourself?”
Jeanne went back into the bathroom and wiped down the counter and basin.
Teddy called from the bedroom, “Have you seen my Waterman?”
“You shouldn’t be straining your eyes by writing.”
“That pen cost more than two hundred dollars.”
“Don’t lie flat. It’ll make the sinuses worse. You need extra pillows.”
“I haven’t seen it since last week.”
“Close your eyes.”
“You took the audiotapes.”
“I’m returning them to the library this afternoon when I take the littlies in the van.” She slipped a twisty around her hair and made a bun tight as a fist. “You could listen to music. Would you like me to find the classical station for you?”
Teddy mumbled that he would and closed his eyes.
Jeanne thought it was unfair of the Universe that men aged so handsomely. At fifty-two Teddy’s polished, preppy good looks had hardened, lost the sweetness that was there when he was young. Now he was just plain turn-around-and-gawk handsome. His strong chin and nose gav
e him the look of a man of character, someone to be relied upon in a pinch or a crisis. This no longer struck her as ironic.
She turned the radio dial. “I met Simon Weed this morning. He seems like a nice man. He told me his wife committed suicide. Hanged herself in the barn and the boy found her.”
“Another traumatized child.” Teddy groaned. “Lucky Hilltop School.”
“He noticed my diploma.”
“So? It’s on the wall.” The music was Wagner. “Turn it down, Jeanne. I can’t take Valhalla this morning.”
She looked at the telephone answering machine on the table next to the radio. She enjoyed talking on the phone, enjoyed being free to speak without being observed. But she resented the demands of the answering machine and would sometimes let twenty calls accumulate before pressing the play button. In her otherwise responsible personality, this was an aberration about which she could seem to do nothing. Did it signal something fundamentally unsound in her? A flaw she had been unable to eradicate?
Only one call today.
“Your sainted friend.” Teddy had never liked Hannah.
“What did she want?”
“I didn’t talk to her, Jeanne.”
“Did she leave a message?”
“I don’t know why we have an answering machine if you won’t use it.”
Jeanne touched the play button. The machine whirred and clicked and Hannah’s deep voice came over the line.
“Come over after school, okay?”
Jeanne pressed rewind.
Teddy thumbed the hollows on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to that building committee meeting, Jeanne. You’re going to have to do it.”
“Teddy, I haven’t seen Liz—”
“Go tonight.”
“It’s board Thursday.”
“The building committee won’t go past five.”
“I promised Edith White I’d listen to the problems the housekeeping staff’s having. Those old bathrooms in Senior House are going to have to be replaced. The maids are sick of the mess. The least we can do is listen to their complaints. You want to do that for me?”
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