The After Party

by Anton Disclafani

  Joan was surprised by her mother’s kindness. She had expected fury. Instead Mary had quickly concocted a plan, and Joan was grateful. She had no feeling about the baby. It was, at this point, an absence: of her regular cycle, of feeling well. The baby was not yet a baby to Joan. That would come later.

  Joan wanted one thing from Mary: a promise that Furlow would never know. It was 1950. Furlow had been born in 1875. She had let a man have sex with her, and this man had not married her after she learned of the child. It would ruin Furlow. His Joan had always existed well above the rest of the world.

  He’ll be none the wiser, Mary told her, and Joan believed her. To have a baby out of wedlock, back then—there would have been nothing left of Joan. There wasn’t any question of Joan marrying the father. The father was one of two boys, but there was no way to tell which one, and anyway, the thought of marrying either one of them, tying herself to him for life, going to him, begging him—it filled her with disgust. Mary seemed to understand that marriage wasn’t an option; Mary seemed to understand everything.

  “We decided I would leave when everyone would be busy. And you would be gone.” We were sitting now, on the hard ground. “That was another reason. You would be in Oklahoma.” Easter came and Joan disappeared.

  I remembered returning from Oklahoma, Mary picking me up, Fred driving. It was all a farce.

  “Did Dorie know?” I asked.

  “If you didn’t know,” she said, “then no one knew.”

  And I was proud, sitting there in the dark cemetery. That I was the person, out of everyone, Mary and Joan had most wanted to fool.

  Joan moved to Plano, outside of Dallas, and lived at a home for unwed mothers. The house was Victorian, winding. The old pine floors were uneven, the windows narrow and tall. Joan’s room overlooked the front yard, which was shaded by oak trees. The view reminded her of Evergreen. She thought of Furlow when she thought of Evergreen.

  “I missed Evergreen,” she said. “I hadn’t thought I would. I was glad to leave it. I had begun to hate it. But then I went away and I realized it was home. The place I went, in Plano—it wasn’t so bad. There were other girls there, like me. We played cards. We ate meals together. We all got fatter and fatter. We wore loose, shapeless clothes. Rags. You would have hated it.”

  She smiled, shyly, in a way completely uncharacteristic of Joan.

  “I was grateful for their company. If the other girls hadn’t been there, I might have lost my mind.”

  But mainly, Joan read. There was a stack of old magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Modern Screen, National Geographic. Joan read each one, cover to cover. She read about the place she was supposed to be. She read about other places, too. When she’d finished with these she asked Mary, who called once a week, for more. Mary sent the most recent issues and Joan disappeared into her bedroom.

  “I’d never pretended I was anyone else,” she said. She rested her chin on her bent knees, a child’s pose. “And now I pretended all the time.”

  “Who did you pretend to be?” I asked.

  “Who didn’t matter,” she said. “Where mattered. I went to Hollywood, yes, but other places, too: London, Cairo. The places I saw in the pictures.” She laughed. “Can you imagine?”

  I could imagine, that was the thing. I saw it so clearly now: without a baby, Joan would have gone, eventually, to one of these places—not Cairo, but New York, LA, even Boston or Miami. She would have married a wealthy man—Joan wasn’t meant for a life without money—a businessman, or maybe a successful writer. Someone who wouldn’t have bored her, someone who could have given her a piece of the world: Taken her to Thailand to tour his textile factories. Taken her to Paris, to an artists’ colony. Taken her away from me, and the life I had built so carefully. I loved the details of my life, most. That Maria arrived each morning precisely at eight. That Tommy would go to River Oaks Elementary, just as Joan and I had. That we all served the same pimiento sandwiches, from the same recipe, at luncheons. That our husbands disappeared onto patios to smoke cigars while we ladies cleared the table. In the end, the details weren’t about beauty or status. They never had been, for me. They were about feeling at home in the world. And Joan hated these details. She thought my existence relentlessly tedious. What she couldn’t see was that the details were life. That was how you loved someone: every day, without fail, over and over.

  Joan waited for me to answer, but I couldn’t speak. It felt like I was seeing her, and myself, clearly for the first time since we were children.

  “Maybe you can’t imagine. But I had a plan, Cece,” Joan continued. “For the first time in my life, I had a plan. Mama thought I was coming back to Houston. But I was never coming back. There was nothing left for me, here. I was going to go someplace where no one knew me. Where no one knew the Fortiers.”

  I had thought Joan needed Houston, needed to be worshipped, known, adored. Imagining her in Hollywood, seeking the adoration of strangers, had barely required any imagination at all. But Joan did not need to be adored. It was we who needed to adore her.

  “You wanted to go where the ideas were,” I said, remembering what she had told me so long ago, as we stood on the steps outside Lamar.

  “Yes,” Joan said. “Yes! That was exactly where I wanted to go. But I never quite made it, did I?” It wasn’t a question I was meant to answer. “Instead I had a baby. Such a cliché: the unmarried girl who gets pregnant and ruins her life. But I wasn’t going to let this baby ruin my life. There was one baby before mine. The girl—her name was Katherine, from St. Louis—labored for a very long time before she went to the hospital. And then we never saw her again. That was the promise of the place: you had a baby and then you left. It felt like a promise, anyway.”

  The next time Houston saw Joan, this period in her life—this sleepy, unchanging routine she found herself in—would be a memory. It would be less than that, because her new life would be so different she would be unable to recall her old life. She would not be able to remember staring at a photograph of Ava Gardner for so long, with such intensity, she saw her face in her dreams. She would not remember asking her mother for a French dictionary over the phone, and her mother’s response—a quick burst of laughter—which had been worse than no. She would not remember the way the girl from St. Louis had grabbed Joan’s hand one morning and put it on her stomach; the undeniable movement she felt beneath her hand, nor the guilty grin on the girl’s face. She would not remember how her own baby felt within her.

  “I would wake up in the middle of the night and he would be moving, constantly, as if he were trying to somersault out of the womb. He made me feel less alone.” She shook her head. “Isn’t that foolish? He wasn’t even a baby at that point. He was half a baby. And he comforted me. I tried not to feel comfort. I knew I would give birth with a cloth over my eyes. I wouldn’t even know if he was a boy or a girl. He would be taken, given to his new parents, right away.”

  She spent four months at the home for unwed mothers. She went into labor a month early, in August. When she woke, she was in a hospital in Dallas. Before she opened her eyes she heard a woman’s voice say it was a shame, one of God’s dirty tricks.

  “The nurse said he wasn’t right. That’s how I knew he was a boy. And then they took me to him. I demanded it.” She looked at me. “I’d never wanted anything, until that point, in my entire life. All I wanted was my baby.”

  The nurse took her to the nursery. Joan’s baby was the only one there, and Joan understood, without anyone telling her, that it was where sick children went. His eyes were closed. He felt stiff against her hands. His hair was dark. Joan was surprised by its thickness. His cheeks were dotted with red spots.

  The baby opened his eyes, and they were a color Joan had never seen: blue, nearly black. Joan reached inside his glass bassinet, touched his dark eyebrow, a smudge on his face. She felt she loved him more, because he wasn’t right. She needed to
protect him.

  “There was a problem with his breathing, during the birth. Oxygen. He didn’t have enough.” Her sentences were short, clipped. “He had a feeding tube.” She touched her nose, where, I understood, the tube had entered her child’s body. “He had seizures. He shook, terribly. He was never going to be what we imagined him to be. And what did we imagine him to be?” She shrugged. “We imagined he would be perfect. That’s what I imagined, anyway, all those hours in the home. I imagined I would have a perfect child and he would go to perfect parents and I would be able to leave, then, go to one coast or the other, or Europe maybe, and not ever have to think about him, because I knew his life would be perfect.” She made a strangled sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

  If you ignored the fact of the feeding tube, the baby looked like any other baby. Nobody used Joan’s name in the hospital; it became clear, after a while, that the doctors and the nurses didn’t know it. There seemed to be an arrangement. Joan wasn’t really there. She wasn’t an unwed mother. She certainly wasn’t the mother of a damaged child. She was no one.

  Joan thought of California, of how the baby would feel the warmth of the pretty sun on his small cheek. Before she knew it, her plans included this tiny infant.

  Mary came after Joan had been in the hospital for nearly two weeks. Joan woke and found her standing over the bassinet. The baby had been brought in from the nursery, for Mary. Joan felt a surge of terror so intense she thought she might vomit.

  “She told me he was beautiful. At first it seemed like she might let me keep him. But I was wrong. She told me he would go to a home. ‘The best money could buy.’ I told her no.” She laughed. “She wasn’t used to me telling her no. To anyone telling her no. She went back to Evergreen. I knew I hadn’t won the war. Only the battle.”

  Mary installed Joan in a furnished apartment in an old neighborhood in Dallas, near the hospital. The neighborhood was pretty, gracious. The houses, including Joan’s small apartment, red brick, with neat lawns.

  When the doorbell rang her first morning, Joan opened the door to Dorie, a suitcase in her hand. Mary had sent her.

  David required round-the-clock care. He was constantly uncomfortable. When he was held, he arched his back, wailed. But when he was set down he seemed bereft. He cried then, too. No surface—not the soft mattress of his crib, not his mother’s arms—could make David comfortable. His left side was so stiff it seemed made of wood.

  “One night I took him in the bath with me, because I didn’t know what else to do. He stopped crying, immediately. I felt happier than I’d ever felt. I spent hours with him, in the bath. He loved the water.”

  “Like his mother,” I said.

  Joan and Dorie took turns with David. Joan could see that Dorie loved David. He was impossible not to love, this helpless, rigid child with her father’s features. She’d written Furlow as his middle name on his birth certificate. She’d known Mary would not approve and she had done it anyway.

  Joan had spent her pregnancy imagining herself into another life. Now it seemed impossible. She was never going to go to Hollywood, to Paris, to Istanbul. But perhaps the life she had imagined had always been unlikely, just out of reach, and David had only helped her realize it.

  “They were the happiest and saddest months of my life. I lived and breathed according to his needs. My own needs? They disappeared. When it was just me and David, at night, it seemed manageable. When he was calm, when he wasn’t in pain, it seemed manageable. After Dorie held him he smelled like her lotion, the same lotion she used when we were children.” Joan smiled. “Right before I left, he could reach up and touch my cheek when I held him. Other times he cried and it seemed like he would never stop. He was in pain and I could not make him feel better. We couldn’t spend every waking moment in the bath. I could only wait for him to cry himself to sleep. Sometimes he did, and sometimes he cried for hours, and then my plan seemed inconceivable.”

  “What was your plan?” I asked. There was a rustle in the bushes, and Joan startled. “Just a squirrel,” I said. “There’s no one here.”

  She was exhausted, spent. Telling her story cost her something, just as it cost me something to hear it.

  “My plan was to take David and Dorie, if she would come, and go somewhere else. Raise David on my own. Are you wondering how I could imagine I was capable of being David’s mother?” She practically spat the words.

  “No,” I said. “You were his mother.”

  She shook her head. “He deserved better. I tricked myself into believing that I could raise him. Mama left us alone those three months. She had to pretend I was in Hollywood. She could tell Daddy nothing. It was a mercy. It meant she couldn’t get away to see us. She called, but it was a party line, so she had to be careful about what she said. She wrote letters, but I refused to read them. And then, one day she came again, when David was thirteen weeks old. I told her I didn’t need her. I told her I would take David and live on my own, far away from her. From Houston. I told her to leave, to never come back.”

  I thought of that long year. Mary had lied to me, to her husband, to everyone about where Joan was. In retrospect, it did not seem possible, that we had believed her. It did not seem possible, that no one had found her out, had glimpsed Joan in Plano or Dallas, had put two and two together. And yet.

  “That’s when Mama told me that I had no money. At first I didn’t believe it. Daddy would never leave me without money. But Mama told him that was the only way I would come back from Hollywood. She’s a smart one, Mama. I could have all the money in the world as long as I did what she wanted.”

  Joan was astounded. I was astounded, listening to her. Furlow Fortier was one of the richest men in Texas. They had so much money Joan never had to think about it, which she would later understand was the truest sign of wealth.

  That day, Mary was dressed in her usual uniform: a slim-fitting skirt, a crisply ironed shirt. The drive from Houston had not rumpled her clothes. Nothing rumpled her mother, Joan realized. Nothing interfered with her plans.

  “Sometimes I couldn’t make myself believe something was wrong with him. It seems so silly. But so much about caring for him was normal. You would know, with Tommy.”

  She gave me a desperate look. I tried not to cry.

  “David dirtied his diapers. He was calmed by my touch. I wanted to tell my mother this, but she didn’t give me a chance. She repeated what the doctors said. That David would never talk, would never walk or crawl. Would never achieve intelligence. Would likely die before his first birthday. I felt like my skin was being peeled from my body as I listened. I thought of all the things I bought, each week. Dorie, for one. She would need to be paid. Groceries. The doctors. All of this required money. I saw that there were two worlds: One for those with money. One for those without.” She laughed. “I had always taken it for granted that I belonged to the former. But I didn’t, not truly. Not like you.”

  “I would have traded the money in an instant for a mother who loved me. For parents who stayed put.”

  Joan nodded. “I know you would have. And that’s the difference between us, Cee.” She plucked a piece of grass from the ground, twirled it between her fingers. “My mother was going to come back the next day, to take David away. Before she left she hugged me. She told me to trust her. I was going to go back to Houston with her. Have a grand homecoming.” She smiled. “For a minute I thought about fighting her. I could take him, money or no money. I could make a life for us. If I’d been a different kind of person, a better person, I might have.

  “I left that night. I took three hundred dollars from Mama’s purse, and a suitcase of clothes. Dorie was with David. I could hear her, singing to him, as I passed by his door.” She paused. “Leaving was easy. The easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, quietly.

  “It’s true. Afterward it was awful. But when I left
that tiny apartment I felt—how can I explain it?” She gave me a pleading look. “It felt like I was shedding a second skin. It had become so hard, Cece. And it was only going to get harder. David was only going to get bigger. I knew every crack in the ceiling of that apartment, every loose floorboard, every scuff on the wall. I had never lived in a place so small. Mama made everything clear: I wasn’t meant to raise a child like David. I wasn’t meant to raise any child. And she was right. So I left. I should have left with David. I should have fought. I didn’t. It was a relief, to leave.”

  “Maybe you left so you wouldn’t have to say good-bye to him.”

  “No.” Her voice was firm. “That’s not why. I know you can’t fathom it: Leaving your child. Being glad to leave him. It’s another way we’re different. Some women are meant to be mothers. I was glad to leave him, Cece.”

  “But you wanted to raise him?” I asked, confused.

  “I did!” she cried. “I did. I wanted both things. I wanted to raise him and leave him. I left. Like I said, I wasn’t meant to be a mother.”

  I thought of my own mother. “What are you meant to be?”

  Joan shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  At the bus depot Joan bought a ticket to Amarillo. It seemed as good a place as any.

  David seemed very far away. Her breasts ached, the way they did when David cried, though Joan had never fed the child from her breast. But then the ache disappeared, and Joan slept. And slept, and slept.

  When she woke she was in Amarillo. She got off the bus, decided that this city was too big. Mary might look for her there. So she bought another ticket, to a smaller city nearby: Hereford. No one would look for her there, she was sure.

  “Everyone thought I was in Hollywood. Instead, I was in the least glamorous place in the world. Everything was painted green. I didn’t understand why, at first. But then I figured it out. It was the color of money.”

  Hereford was surrounded by feedlots. She could smell it before she saw it. Beef Capital of the World, read a cow-shaped sign. There were thousands of cows, as far as the eye could see. No, Mary would not think to look for her there.