by Selena Kitt
Leah made the pretense, snapping her pocketbook open.
“Hundreds,” Patty hissed, her eyes flashing with anger.
“What?”
“There were hundreds,” her mother whispered through clenched teeth. “I have no idea who your father is. I will never know, and neither will you.”
“What?” Leah’s knees felt weak, so weak she had to move beside her mother to sit on the bench. They both sat there, side by side, staring at the floor. “What are you saying?”
She looked at her mother, seeing how she clutched her pocketbook, knuckles starting to turn white. Her face was flushed with color and her eyes looked wet.
“Mother?” Leah prompted, her voice soft now.
“I promised myself I would never tell you,” Patty whispered to the wall of dresses to her right, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “I promised myself I would never let you get involved, not like Susan, not like I did.”
“What are you talking about?” Leah puzzled. It was as if her mother was speaking a different language, some sort of strange code.
“Susan was so caught up, and I got caught up right along with her,” Leah’s mother said, half-smiling at her daughter. “I never had much of a backbone. I followed her around the same way you follow Erica. Such bright lights. Like moths to flame, we are.”
Leah blinked, considering her mother’s words. She had learned far too much about her mother’s relationship with Susan, Erica’s mother and Rob’s first wife, than she had ever wanted to know. She knew they had been together—all three of them, Patty, Susan and Rob—and that was, of course, the reason Leah’s mother had once believed he had fathered her child.
But the blood test had proven that wasn’t possible.
She knew her mother and Susan had maintained their friendship through the years. They’d been close. Her mother had been devastated to lose her friend to lung cancer at such a young age. Leah tried to imagine how she would feel, if it was Erica, and that made her heart ache.
Her mother was right, after all. Erica was spunky and intrepid, just like her mother, and Leah often found herself following her friend to places she knew she shouldn’t go. Had her mother done the same with Susan? Clearly, she had. And how could Leah play judge and jury when Leah had done the same thing with Erica?
“I thought she was enamored with the promise of the money at first, but I didn’t understand how involved she already was, how her own mother had planned it from the start,” Patty went on, still talking in that strange language Leah couldn’t quite decipher. She was speaking English but the words didn’t make any sense. “And in the end, she was so much in love with him and she couldn’t see any other way.”
“What are you talking about?”
Patty took her daughter’s hands, trying to get her message across. “He was handsome then, Leah! So handsome! But it was more than that. It’s hard to explain. He wasn’t just charming—he was… he was…magnetic!” Patty’s eyes were shining, a faraway look on her face. Then she focused back on her daughter, squeezing her hands. “You know, I watch you girls react to that young Elvis Presley, and that’s how we were with him. He was like a living god…”
“Who?” Leah asked. “Rob?”
“No.” Patty laughed. “Father Patrick.”
“Father… Patrick.” Leah sank against the cushioned seat back, staring off into space, whispering the words. “Father Patrick… is my father?”
“He could be.” Patty looked down at her hands and her voice shook. “So could one of a hundred other priests.”
“Oh no. Mother, no.” Leah groaned, putting her head in her hands, feeling a wave of nausea pass over her. “Not… the Magdalenes?”
Patty gasped. “You know?”
“Erica…” Leah whispered, dumbly nodding her head.
“Erica?” Leah’s mother furrowed her brow, looking puzzled. “But Rob made an arrangement. Father Patrick swore he would never initiate Erica.”
“Well, he lied. Are you surprised?”
Mother and daughter stared at each other, letting their newfound knowledge sink in. The shop was quiet. Even the gaggle of girls around the corner had gone silent, or maybe they had simply left.
“You didn’t give me up,” Leah said, realizing all at once what this meant.
“I couldn’t,” her mother choked. “I took one look at you and…I fell in love.”
“Really?” Leah felt a lump growing in her throat. “Are you sure you loved me, and not just the idea of having a baby? Someone who was all yours, someone you could make all the decisions for, so you could get it right the second time around?”
“No, Leah.” Her mother turned toward her, their knees touching. “Please don’t think that, not for a minute. I sacrificed everything for you, don’t you understand? I could have walked away with ten thousand dollars if I’d given you up! I defied everyone and everything by keeping you.”
“Huh.” Leah considered this. “Maybe that’s why you did it.”
“No! The easy thing was giving you up. I chose the hard thing. I became a widow so I could raise you without the scandal of having you out of wedlock. And I did that for you. I made up a father because you deserved one. I did that for you. I worked every day to make a living for us, when I could have walked away with the money and gone anywhere. And I did that for you.”
Leah considered this too. “I think you did it for you.”
“Oh God, Leah, I don’t know what you want from me. No matter what I say, it doesn’t matter. You’ll always believe the worst.”
“Can you blame me?” Leah croaked, feeling that dam in her throat about to burst.
“No.” Leah’s mother went to touch her daughter’s cheek, but Leah pulled away, not wanting her to see how hurt she was.
“Why did you stay here?” Leah asked, thinking of her friend, Marty, who had left the Magdalenes, had taken her baby halfway across the world to escape. “Why would you stay in this town?”
“Nothing is that simple.” Leah’s mother sighed. “Donald offered me a job in his law office. He even paid to train me. And then your grandmother died and left me the house. I couldn’t afford much on my salary. And you were a growing girl, and there was tuition to pay.”
“Did you stay at Magdalene House?”
Her mother lowered her head in assent. “Yes.”
“But you didn’t give me up?”
“No, I… I ran away.”
“You ran away?” Leah frowned. “How? Where did you go?”
“I saved my money and on one of our trips to town, I snuck away and took the bus back to Detroit.”
Leah remembered those trips to town, how all the girls had worn fake wedding rings, pretending they were married, but of course everyone knew. They were naughty, wicked girls. Pariahs to be avoided at the very least, targets to be taunted if anyone was so inclined.
“So Robert and Susan helped you?” Leah asked, knowing the answer. They had not only helped her then, but they had continued to help her, paying for Leah’s dance lessons, taking the growing girls school shopping for their expensive uniform clothes every year. There were trips to California and Florida and New England that the Nolans had included them in, like family, all because they shared a secret.
“Yes,” her mother said. “I gave birth to you at home. I wouldn’t go to the hospital. I was too afraid they would find me and take you. After you born, Robert took me to see Donald Highbrow. You know the rest.”
“Was Joan Goulden working at Magdalene House when you were there?” Leah remembered sitting across a desk from the woman they called “the ghoul” because she wore so much makeup it was impossible to tell her age. She could have been forty or eighty for all they knew. She was just “the ghoul” to them, a caricature of a person, with about as much personality and heart.
Leah’s mother nodded, looking at the carpet. “She was younger then, just starting out.”
“Does she know?” Leah wondered out loud. “Does she know about the Mary
Magdalenes?”
“Of course she knows,” Leah’s mother replied, staring at her daughter with a look that was both patronizing and incredulous at the same time. “They all know. The doctors, the nurses, the nuns, the priests. Even with the incentive bonuses the Magdalenes get for giving up their babies, the church more than doubles that in adoption donations. And the agency Goulden works for gets a cut, of course. I think the social workers even get adoption bonuses for every successful adoption they facilitate.”
That fact horrified Leah so much she had a hard time forming words. “Did you know… did you know she was going to trick me? Did you and… Joan…”
It was hard to say her name, hard not to think of her as anything but “the ghoul,” hard to imagine she was a human being with feelings. The lawyer had said he believed the social workers were doing good. No, he said he believed they believed it. There was a difference. The social workers truly believed they were doing the right thing. Joan Goulden was a person, a woman who probably had a family of her own. How had she spent the adoption bonus she’d received for Grace, Leah wondered? A new pair of earrings? A summer vacation?
“Did you and Joan plan to take Grace away from me?” Leah whispered her worst fear, saying it out loud to her mother for the first time.
“No!” Patty Wendt looked truly horrified. “Leah, no! Never! I just didn’t want you to go through what I went through, that’s all. We always want to protect our children from the hard things, and being a mother on your own isn’t easy. Besides, remember, I really believed that Rob was your father…”
“You knew he might not have been.”
“I just didn’t…” Her mother closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to think about that. I think I convinced myself, over the years, that he was your father. We were all such good friends, and the Nolans were always so generous. Before Susan died, I thought it might be because she was afraid I would tell him… but I never did. I never would have. And when she finally told him, she was dying…”
“So he didn’t know?” Leah had wondered if Rob knew about the Mary Magdalenes all along. How in the world had he gotten involved? She couldn’t imagine Rob agreeing to Erica’s participation in the Mary Magdalenes, not in a million years. But she also never would have imagined that he had a secret room under his loft bed that contained what amounted to a mountain of obscene, illegal images—both still and moving—either.
“No!” Patty snorted. “He didn’t know anything until Susan got cancer. That’s when she told him everything.”
“She told him about Father Patrick?” Leah wondered aloud. “About being in love with him?”
Her mother smiled thinly. “There are some secrets a woman keeps for a lifetime.”
“How long has this been going on?” Leah got up, pacing back and forth in front of the dresses, wheels turning.
“The Mary Magdalenes? I honestly don’t know,” her mother admitted. “A long time.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” Leah flipped through the dresses, one by one. “Why didn’t you expose them? Stop it?”
“Oh Leah, I wish it was that simple.” Patty joined her daughter by the rack of dresses, her voice low. “The church… it’s so powerful. You have no idea. Father Patrick has the ear of every bishop and cardinal in the state. He’s had an audience with the Pope!”
“But he’s still doing it.” Leah grabbed one of the dresses off the rack, shaking it at her mother, brandishing it like a weapon. “And you knew it.”
Patty shrank away, blinking back tears. “What else could I do? I was a woman, alone! I was just glad to get out. And I got to keep you, didn’t I?”
Leah looked down at the dress in her hands. “I don’t know if that’s much consolation…”
“Oh Leah, no.” Her mother grabbed hold of her daughter’s hands, still gripping the hanger.“Think of little Grace, how much you love her, how much you want to give her. Think of how much you would sacrifice for her.”
Leah lowered her head, feeling the tears she’d been holding back start to fall. Thinking about Grace inevitably brought them to the surface. “I would do anything.”
“I know.” Her mother whispered, cupping Leah’s face in her hands. She hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. Leah lifted her eyes, meeting her mother’s gaze. “I know because I love you like that, Leah. Please believe me. I didn’t do it for me. I did it for you.”
“Oh Leah, you have to try that on!” Erica interrupted them both before Leah could respond, coming around the corner and seeing Leah still holding a dress in her hands, knuckles white, fingers tight around the hanger.
“That is one of our lovelier gowns,” Irene agreed, peeking around the corner and joining them when it looked as if the coast was clear. “It was modeled after Grace Kelly’s—twenty-five yards of peau de soie, twenty-five yards of silk taffeta, three-hundred yards of Valenciennes lace and countless seed pearls.”
“It suits you perfectly,” Leah’s mother said, touching her daughter’s cheek. Leah glanced down at the dress. She had hardly even looked at it. “Innocent and beautiful, just like you.”
“Well go try it on!” Erica urged.
Irene took Leah into one of the fitting rooms, leaving her alone with the gown but telling her to call for her when she got it mostly on, as there were dozens of buttons to be done up the back. Leah undressed slowly, hands shaking slightly, still trying to absorb what her mother had revealed. She had asked for honesty, had demanded it in fact, but the news she’d received had been more shocking than anything she could have imagined. It was true after all—you should be careful what you wished for.
Leah left her clothes on the padded bench, standing in front of the full-length mirror in her bra, panties, garters and stockings, still wearing her heels. The wedding dress was voluminous, the layers of fabric shockingly heavy as she slipped her arms through the long, full-length lace sleeves, white satin falling all around her hips. The neck was high as her mother had suggested, but it was sheer lace, showing the pale cream of Leah’s throat and the upper part of her chest.
“You can come in now,” Leah called and Irene opened the door, smiling as she stepped into the dressing room.
“Oh, lovely,” Irene murmured, looking at Leah’s reflection in the mirror. Irene produced a tool to do up the buttons in back and they were fastened in no time.
Leah stared at herself in the mirror, her long, dark hair falling in carefully set waves over her shoulders, down the back of the dress. She would probably have it put up for the wedding, depending on the type of veil she chose.
“Do you have a veil for this dress?” she asked, smoothing the fabric over her middle. She was two sizes larger than she’d been before Grace, and her body was still resuming its original shape, although she was beginning to wonder if it would make it all the way back. She needed to start dancing again.
“It’s divine. Stay here.” Irene disappeared again and Leah touched the lace at her throat, marveling at the gorgeous handiwork. What would Rob be thinking when she walked down the aisle in this dress, she wondered? How long it would be before he could get me out of it. She giggled at the thought, cheeks flushing. She’d thought a great deal about her wedding when she was young, but never her honeymoon. Now she was looking forward to both.
“Here we are!” The veil was a delicate, Juliet cap affair that Irene clipped into place, fluffing the veil over Leah’s face, arranging. “Oh my goodness, what a beautiful bride you make!”
Leah blushed at the compliment, following Irene out of the dressing room and down the hallway. She heard Erica’s gasp before she saw her wide eyes and the bemused smile starting on her face. When Leah looked over at her mother, she saw with wonder and a little bit of awe, that she had tears in her eyes.
She stepped toward the three-way mirror, the train of material following her, looking at herself in amazement. She’d been transformed from an ordinary girl to a goddess with one simple costume change. Irene urged her u
p on the pedestal so she could arrange the train and veil behind her. Erica crowded next to Leah, looking at their reflection side by side in the mirror, her eyes damp too.
“I feel like a fairy princess,” Leah whispered, taking Erica’s hand in hers and squeezing.
“You look like one,” her mother assured her, stepping into view on Leah’s other side, going up on tiptoe to brush her daughter’s cheek with a soft kiss. Leah couldn’t remember the last time her mother had kissed her.
Leah met her mother’s eyes in the mirror, not as a daughter looking at her mother, but as a woman meeting the eyes of another woman. They had far more common ground than Leah ever had wanted to admit as a teenager, but she saw it and understood it now in one glance. Patty Wendt was a woman and a mother. How could Leah fault her for hardening her heart in a world that treated her like a piece of property, that used and defiled her, that abused and demeaned her at every turn?
Leah lived in that world too. Nothing had changed. But her mother had loved her and had tried to protect her from it all along, just like Leah loved Grace and she knew she would do everything in her power to protect her daughter from the same mistakes she’d made. Funny how the universe repeated patterns ad infinitum, generation after generation, until someone finally turned around and started walking in the other direction.
She felt her mother’s hand slip into hers and Leah squeezed it, smiling. She would never know who her real father was. She didn’t have a father to walk her down the aisle and give her away. But she had her mother, and she knew, finally, that her mother really did love her.
“Mom, Erica’s going to be my maid of honor.” Leah smiled at her friend, feeling tears pricking her eyes. “But I was wondering if you would walk me down the aisle and give me away?”
“Oh Leah…” Patty Wendt’s face crumbled, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I never wanted to give you away.”
Leah smiled. “Is that a no?”
“No, sweetheart.” Leah’s mother opened her pocketbook, looking for a tissue. “Of course I will. It’s just… you’ll always be my little girl.”