The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  “Like he was letting people out of prison for money? That’s hard to swallow. He’s always been so over the top about punishing criminals, locking them up forever and throwing away the key.”

  “We’re not talking about petty criminals, your mule caught with cocaine in her tummy, the guy peddling smoke in the ’hood, guys boosting cars. We’re talking white-collar criminals.”

  “Like what? I still don’t get it.”

  “Like the guy embezzling old ladies out of their savings, the guy with his hand in the till at the corporation, the assistant principal who gets pay-backs from contractors. The savings and loan officer who lent himself a bundle. Real estate scams. Second mortgage scams. Contractors caught using second-rate material when the bridge or the roof collapses. I’ve just begun digging. That guy gave us gold, Lissa, solid gold.”

  “That’s hard to believe—that my father would just sell pardons or early paroles. It just seems too gross. I can’t imagine Rosemary letting him get involved with anything so shady.”

  “It’s oblique. The funds come roundabout. You have to follow the computer trail to get back to King Richard. I’m still trying to sort it out.”

  She closed her eyes and considered her parents, trying to imagine them from outside of the box of family. They certainly always needed money. Dick had family and connections; Rosemary had brains. Neither of them had brought cash to the table. Rosemary had invested shrewdly and obviously nowadays there was a lot more money than when she was little. But Rosemary hated to use their own investments to subsidize campaigns. Politics ran on money, Melissa had known that as far back as she could remember. Backers, supporters were the people who had to be pleased, whose desires ruled the city, the state, the nation. The corporations that spent money on a candidate bought the official’s votes. That was simple enough; she had always understood those facts. But selling pardons seemed worse—if he really had done that. Briefly she wondered if they could not use this information to blackmail Dick and Rosemary into letting her stay in school. But they could not “let” or “refuse” any longer. She was a married woman. That was hard to believe while she was still living in her dorm and he, in his. Nonetheless they were legally married, meaning her parents could no longer coerce her. She finally had someone to stand between her and their power over her. She could see that Blake was really excited by what he had uncovered, and she could recognize that it looked as if her father had engaged in underhanded practices. The discovery was something that potentially could hurt him, although he had weathered many considerable scandals during his years in office. She supposed, in an ideal world, Dick would be punished for his abuse of public office, but this world was a mess anyhow.

  Why wasn’t she more excited? Perhaps because she no longer needed to fight her parents to kick free. She had put herself beyond their reach. She was safe from their meddling. Safe from the swift, lethally sharp blade of their decisions that had always whacked through her life whenever they chose. Blake was not the first person they had decided she could not consort with. Boyfriends, girlfriends, families of whom they did not approve, the Korean-American boy Mark. “No, you may not go to Rosalia’s birthday party.” “We don’t want you seeing that Levin boy again.” “No, you may not,” again and again. They had done the same thing to Merilee; they were still doing the same thing to Merilee. She, who was supposed to be the weak one, had dared what her golden brilliant sister could not: she had set a barrier between herself and Dick and Rosemary’s ability to control.

  He was still going on about his discovery. “We have to work our way down this whole list to prove our case. I thought we’d split the names. I’ve noted the ones I was able to get the details on so far. I’ll print it out for you.”

  “Why not just e-mail it to me? Then I’d have it right on my computer. Easier.”

  “Because e-mail is never secure, and I don’t want them getting one of their jazzy research assistants to hack into our e-mail and find out what we know.”

  She didn’t much feel like traipsing back to her dorm and sitting at the computer until the wee hours running down meaningless names. “You know, I can’t just hack into databases the way you can. It’s not my expertise.”

  “I’ll help you. At some point you have to learn how to do it anyhow. It’s a necessary skill.”

  She put her hand on his knee. “Blake, we’re together now. We’re in it for life. How much longer do we have to go on bothering with my father? When do we just say good-bye to them and get on with our lives?”

  “When I’ve got justice at last. And this is my life.” His tone was cold. He was disappointed, she could tell, that she wasn’t more enthusiastic.

  “Did you ever really want to dig up stuff on him so I could influence him? Or was that just to get me involved?”

  “I never knew your father personally. I thought you might be able to approach him. I even thought by and by he might issue a posthumous pardon for my father, to clear his name. As I’ve gotten to know your parents, I’ve begun to doubt that either of us could ever persuade your father to change his mind or his course. But I still need justice, and if we have to blackmail him to get it, so be it. Right now, we need to make them back off. I don’t think you want a showdown with them just yet. We can distract them with some bad publicity, maybe, and get them off your back.”

  To please him, she sat down beside him at his computer and tried to follow what he was doing. In the end, however, he decided that it would take more time than he was willing to spend to teach her some of his tricks. Now she was disappointed too, because he was clearly going to spend the whole evening at his computer. He did not really care if she stayed or went back to the room she shared with Emily. She decided she might as well return and catch up on classwork.

  She had to take an interest in his crusade, she told herself as she walked across the path to her dorm through the bleak chilly night. After all, investigating Dick was something they could share. Her father wielded great power as a senator. The reasons she had agreed to investigate him still held, in spite of her own feelings that she had escaped them. Blake had liberated her, but she could not therefore decide that she was indifferent to her father’s errors. She would do better next time Blake approached her with the results of his research. She would force out enthusiasm. Since investigating Dick was so important to Blake, she would try to make it important to herself. But she was beginning to feel caught between her husband and her parents.

  The next day she did not hear from him at all. They had taken care to enroll in the same European history class, but he was not there. She took careful notes so she could share them with him. Finally, on Thursday, she rushed over to see him in the late afternoon. She was determined to heal the little rift her lack of enthusiasm had caused.

  He was sitting at his computer, as she had guessed. His eyes were bloodshot. His clothes looked as if he had not changed them since yesterday at least. The dregs of old coffee sat in paper cups on the floor, the desk. Remnants of pizza lay in the box it had arrived in, on his bed, in which he clearly had not spent the night. He had not shaved, and his black beard with coppery glints shadowed his cheeks and chin. His room was usually so neat, the chaos and the litter were almost shocking.

  “How is it going?” she asked cautiously, moving the pizza box to perch on the edge of his bed.

  “I’ve found all but two of the names on the list,” he said, his voice rough with lack of use. “I don’t think it’s worth trying to find out what happened with the last two. Maybe they got off on appeal, whatever.”

  “But how many does that make, that you’ve verified were pardoned or paroled?”

  “Eighteen. Now I’m trying to run down the contributors and see what their interest was. Sometimes it’s easy—a wife, a brother, a father, an uncle, a business partner. Sometimes it’s harder to dig up, but then I can ferret out the connection—business or financial. Some I can’t trace yet.”

  “How many have you been able to connect?”

&
nbsp; “I’m not sure.” He called up a new computer screen and counted out loud. “Thirteen.”

  “That’s two thirds. Isn’t that enough to prove your case?” She stepped up beside him and read the screen. “Blackstone. I remember him. He actually came to dinner at the mansion.”

  “For twenty thousand, I’d imagine Blackstone rated a dinner.”

  “I remember him because I’d been reading a children’s book about a magician with the same name. Blackstone the magician. I asked him if he did magic tricks, and Rosemary looked annoyed, then said, You might say that he does have a talent for making things disappear. Then my father looked annoyed in his turn. He almost never gets angry at Rosemary, but I think he was angry right then. Obviously she couldn’t resist a crack. Maybe she didn’t like what was going on.”

  “Clearly, however, she had to have known about the scheme. Blackstone…. His brother was a lawyer who embezzled money and valuables from estates of his clients.”

  “No wonder Rosemary thought my question was awkward.”

  “After all, it wasn’t her money.” Blake leaned way back in his chair, his eyelids drooping. “So you actually saw him with them. He’s the earliest name on this list.”

  “My father had only been governor for a year or so.”

  “You know, I’m wiped. Totally. It just hit me. I’m hungry, I’m tired, I can’t think. My eyeballs feel boiled. I’ve downed so much black coffee, I don’t have a stomach lining.”

  She put her arms around him, holding his head to her breasts. “Come lie down. Take a nap. You’ll feel better. Come on, baby.”

  “I can’t sleep yet. I’ll take a shower. Then let’s get something decent to eat. Chicken. I think I want chicken. Real chicken.”

  “Whatever you want. And change your clothes. Just stand them in the corner and let them air out.”

  “I must be a little ripe.” Mischievously he rubbed his stubbled chin across her neck. “Let me clean up.”

  They went off on his bike to find supper—not one of the fast-food places where they usually ate but what he defined as a real restaurant. He did in fact have chicken, roasted on a spit. He was happy and the wound was sealed.

  “After college, do you want to live in Philadelphia?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’d kind of like to try the West Coast. The Bay Area or maybe Seattle. It’s early to make plans. I might have to go where jobs are.”

  But she needed plans. She needed something concrete to believe in. “I’ve been to L.A. but I’ve never been in San Francisco. I love the idea of California.”

  He was frowning. “I really would like to run down those last five names.”

  “Seth on my floor comes from Orinda. He says it’s in the hills above Berkeley. His web site has photos of his family’s house, and it looks, like, beautiful—all on a steep hill and with exotic trees.” She was on a coed floor this year.

  “I’m going to check out possibilities—that maybe those guys died or something.”

  When they had eaten and ridden around in the clear crisp night air for half an hour, they went back to his room and made love. He fell asleep immediately after. Careful not to wake him, she extricated herself from the tangle of his long limbs. She was tempted to stay, but she had an early class. Out she tiptoed, greatly relieved. Her Blake was sensitive and needed constant encouragement—and why not, didn’t she need the same thing? They were both insecure at the core, lonely. That was why they could understand each other so intensely.

  To Emily she said, “I think I’m, like, a much more selfish person than Blake is. He cares about justice. He cares about the larger picture. I care about my own freedom and my own happiness. That’s a difference between us. But I can become a better person too, if I try.”

  Emily just gazed at her, her chin down against her chest. Finally she said, “That’s just so much BS. You’re a good person. Blake’s not pure. He’s manipulative. He gets what he wants from you.”

  “Not as often as he should. I mean to be really good for him. I do.”

  “Let’s hope it’s mutual, Melissa.” Emily shook her head slowly. “I’m not always sure about him. He has a lot of agenda. Sometimes I trust him, and sometimes I really, really don’t.”

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE •

  Melissa and Blake were having a picnic on the floor of his dorm room. They had planned to take the bike up into the hills, but the weather had shut them down. The day was dank and cold, with a wet fierce wind that bashed the dead leaves against the buildings. He was on a chicken jag, so they ate take-out chicken, coleslaw and french fries on a blanket, sitting cross-legged with a new Khaled record blasting from his speakers.

  “So how come you aren’t racist?” he asked her. “Everyone else in your family seems to be.”

  She frowned. She did not want to answer off the top of her head. Finally she offered, tentatively, “I think it’s because of how hard it is to get in college these days. Like it isn’t enough to have the grades and the money. You have to rack up all these extracurricular activities and community service. I was volunteering in Hartford. People think like it’s all insurance companies and glass buildings. Sure, the suburbs are rich, but the city is a great big slum.”

  “So that turned you off, or what?”

  “I was working with these kids, an after-school program tutoring them. I liked them. About two thirds of them were African-American, and most of the rest were Latino. It wasn’t like I expected. They wanted the after-school stuff as long as I made it interesting, and they made it interesting for me. It was the first time in my life I ever dealt a lot with kids who weren’t white—this is going to make me to so sound like a simp—but I just liked being with them. I felt better with them than I did with the girls at Miss Porter’s. I liked myself when I was with them. We laughed a lot. Oh, they would put me on. But I didn’t mind. It was, I guess, a big escape from my life.”

  “So that changed your attitudes?”

  “It made me think about them. Oh, in school, we talked about racism and I was against it, in theory, you know. But this wasn’t theory. They were real kids and I got to know a lot about them—tutoring them in English, having them write about their lives and their dreams.”

  “I couldn’t hate whites because my mother was white and I loved her like crazy. Then the Ackermans took me in. I knew how hard Si tried to save my father. I’ll always love him for that, besides how good they are to me.”

  “But you told me you felt like an outsider.”

  “I am. I’m my father’s only son, his only child. I have a duty to him. I can never forget that. I’m not Si and Nadine’s kid, I’m Toussaint and Anne’s. I’m a Parker. I was born an outsider, and I became ten times more of an outsider the moment the cops broke in and busted my father. I’m the son of a man the state murdered—not because of anything bad he did, but because of his strength, because of the good he did. I never forget. If I ever forgot it, I would die inside. Everything that’s strong and real in me would dry up.”

  “Maybe you should change your name back to Parker and we should both be Parker.”

  “I couldn’t do that to Si and Nadine. It would be like slapping them down. And it would raise all the questions I’ve skirted around with the authorities about who I really am.” He leaned over to caress her cheek. “But it’s sweet of you to suggest that. Maybe someday I’ll take my father’s name back. When I’ve earned it. Then we can share it.”

  A party was getting going on his floor. His friend Jamal came knocking on the door. “Time to shake it, bro. I got to run the music, so it will be loud and fat.”

  At once Blake jumped to his feet, forgetting their conversation she had so wanted to continue. “Coming!”

  She forgot her disappointment when they started to dance. She wasn’t the world’s coolest dancer, but she did okay. At least she followed the music. Blake danced well, although there were far fancier steps being laid down. The hall was jammed with moving bodies, and she had to watch out not to get
slammed or elbowed. She forgot to mind the interruption and lived in her body.

  HE CAUGHT HER after class the next afternoon. They sat on a bench facing across the green downhill into the town, much more visible now that the leaves had fallen. “Well, the shit hit the fan. Sara told Si and Nadine I had something important to spill. So Nadine called me last night with Si on the extension. So what’s up?” He imitated her way of speaking. “So what do you have to tell us?”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I couldn’t see any reason to lie.”

  “What did they say?”

  He shrugged. “What you’d expect. Anyhow, they’re coming up Saturday, so we had better be prepared to defend ourselves.”

  EMILY SAID, “Two lawyers for in-laws. That could be brutal.” She was dressing slutty. Mitch had dumped her so she was on the prowl to hook up with someone new. “My hair looks like shit. Maybe I should go blond.”

  “You look fine. Just brush it up the way you do, to give it some body. Whose party is this?”

  “Some girl Ronnie knows. It’s a Halloween party.” She eased on a pair of fishnet stockings. “I’m going as a whore. I thought that would get attention.”

  “But the kind you want?” Melissa thought she would never have the guts to wear something like that, with a huge midriff, a skirt more like a Band-Aid than a real piece of clothing.

  “Exactly the kind I want.” Emily was applying makeup, including mascara and dark red lipstick, twice as heavily as usual. “Do you think Blake’s parents will try to get the marriage annulled?”

  “I have to persuade them not to.” She must convince them they wanted to welcome her into their family. They would be fine protection. What she wanted more than anything else was to be free of her parents and safe from their interference. All her longing now was for the approval of the Ackermans. She would show them what a wonderful daughter-in-law she could be, if only she knew the rules of their game.