That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “He looks like him, Rebecca. He looks just like him.”

  This pained her more. She didn’t think she could feel worse, but she did. “You lied. Cheryl, you lied to me. You lied to the judge, the court. It’s perjury.” Every shade, every ghost, every version of her baby’s father, departed, vanished, drifted away like smoke. She’d loved them all, every imagined father, loved and hated them all, and now she was alone with this.

  Cheryl shrugged. “What does that matter?” She stood and walked away. She turned back. “I told you, I’m not a saint. I’m a real person.”

  “Why would you lie, about this?”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted the baby, Rebecca. It doesn’t matter. It’s—a victimless crime.”

  “What about your brother? Doesn’t he have the right to know?”

  “What about me? Don’t I have the right to decide? He’s my brother.”

  “He’s my son.”

  “Because I said he could be.” This was not anger. This was pride.

  Rebecca was exasperated but this was true. “Well, why did you then?”

  “Because it was obvious. Because it was easier. Because my mother was dead, and I didn’t know what else to do. Because I was going to have a baby. Because I was overwhelmed. And because you wanted him. You wanted him. I couldn’t take him. It was simple.”

  “But we lied.”

  “But it worked out. I thought it would—you would give him a good life. And you had money, and education, and you’re nice, and my mother liked you, and Christopher, and Jacob, and she knew you. It was a fitting end.”

  “My God, Cheryl.” Rebecca wanted to do something: take off her shoes, take off her jacket, have a drink, go outside, run around the house, scream, go upstairs, grab Andrew, drive home, pretend this had never happened. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Cheryl was quiet. “I shouldn’t have told you like this.”

  Rebecca was still whispering because now it seemed important the children not overhear, though the children mostly ignored them. “Does Ian know?”

  “He’s my husband, Rebecca. He knows.”

  This was further betrayal, which she’d not thought possible—Ian, she was so certain that they were close.

  “Ian had his reservations, if you want the truth.”

  “About lying. About perjury.” This was a relief.

  “And about—a black boy, a white family. He had his concerns. You know, he grew up with six big brothers and sisters. Uncles, aunts, cousins, great aunts, neighbors, the whole thing. It was just me and my mom, in it together. I went to the good high school and there were no black girls there. Three or four. And mom wouldn’t let me talk to them, be friends with them. I couldn’t get distracted. So—it wasn’t that big a worry, for me, not the way it was for Ian.”

  Rebecca knew; Ian had tried to tell her about this, before. “Right.”

  “He says it’s different, for boys, than for girls.”

  “OK.” Rebecca still didn’t know what to do with her body. She was pacing around between the island and the sink. “You shouldn’t have done this.”

  “What should I have done?” Cheryl was no longer scolding, was sincerely asking. “I made a choice; maybe it was a mistake, but that goes back to my point. I’m just a person, just another fucked-up person, just like you, making mistakes, trying to be.”

  “It does something to it, to know that we lied.”

  “It just shows you what you don’t always remember, Rebecca. That I’m a real person, and not only that, I’m a person who—your entire life, now, it’s because of me. I’m not just someone you visit once a month. Someone whose kid plays with your kid.”

  “You hate me.” Rebecca braced her hands against the countertop.

  Cheryl laughed. “Don’t you realize—you’re more than forty years old, how can you not realize? How can you not understand that I’m as capable of hate and love, annoyance and happiness, at the same time, as you are?”

  Rebecca looked around the room, the bent wire dish rack, the ceramic saltshaker, the bent metal spoon rest on top of the stove. “Maybe. I’m sorry.” She was close to tears, maddeningly.

  “What do you think family is, anyway, Rebecca?”

  Rebecca floated above the anger, the confusion, the heat of her own embarrassment and shame. She thought of Andrew, upstairs, a father, somewhere in the world, the life they had made for him and whether or not it was an honest one, a good one. She’d have said that it was, said it with confidence, a reflex without reflection. Cheryl was her family and Cheryl was her friend and Rebecca did know her and she wanted to say that all, but she knew that Cheryl wasn’t waiting, she knew it was the sort of question with no particular answer.

  35

  JIM WILLIS SENT A BOY NAMED TYLER TO FETCH HER. THAT’S WHO would inherit the world next: boys named Tyler. This one was a poet—Jim’s pet student would of course be a poet—who had the sort of handsomeness that was simply a lack of ugliness, and was, too, utterly without character: symmetry, nice proportion, no offense, all framed by thick brown hair shaped in a generic way, like a Ken doll. He could have been an extra in a film, about to be shipped off to Normandy, where he’d be certain to die. He was like a glass of milk or a bar of soap come to life as a person.

  But Tyler was pleasant, even nervous. She made him nervous. It was not his usual way: What would a boy like Tyler have to fear in this world? He had polished manners and a late-model luxury car. He smelled of suburban comfort, of Grosse Pointe, Oak Park, Westchester County. Rebecca wondered what his parents made of their son, whose swim meets they’d dutifully attended, going off to write sestinas in Ohio, spending a hundred grand of their hard-earned (a doctor? a lawyer? an ad executive?) dollars.

  “We read your books.” Tyler was attempting nonchalance, failing. The fact of it, the fact of the books, was astonishing to him. But he was twenty-one, twenty-two; the world was astonishing.

  “Thank you.” This was not, strictly speaking, a compliment, but Rebecca understood what it concealed. “Tell me about your work.”

  This was a defensive position disguised as kindness. Talking about her books usually laid bare the fact that most people were quite dumb. She liked seeing people holding their copies, cradling close both Galatea and Diana, loved the idea of Jim’s seminar room, eleven urgent undergraduates poking and prodding at her books. Just leave her out of it.

  Jim was known as a great teacher. But you couldn’t teach the deployment of the skills you were honing. The kids were skilled chefs who could only cook hot dogs, petit Picassos unable to complete a connect-the-dots. Their poems were finely built but about the stupidest things possible. What did Tyler, what did any American boy, know? Parental love, cable television, organized sports, liberal politics, peacetime, prosperity? You had to get this out of your system. You had to reach the point where those things seemed the fallacy they were. You had to grow the fuck up. Rebecca wondered about Tyler’s poetry the way you wondered about spoiled food, the same perverse pleasure in how awful it smells.

  “I loved the Icarus part, most. If I can say so.” Tyler shifted the car’s gear smoothly and gave her a sideways glance.

  The road looked like every road. Buildings with some mysterious purpose she’d never learn. “Thank you.” Everyone loved the Icarus part, because they understood it the best.

  “It’s one of my favorite paintings, actually. The Bruegel.”

  “Poor fellow. An afterthought.” Everyone loved the Bruegel; who alive did not love Bruegel?

  “Right!” Tyler was excited. “Like. He was even more—he thought it was so big but it was so, so small.”

  “The incredible folly of believing in your significance.” Rebecca turned and looked out of the window.

  They said their good-byes with some lingering awkwardness. Maybe that was in her mind. She’d gone further with Tyler, telling him about the Air Florida flight that had crashed in Washington, and how she’d met her husband just days later, telling him that there was
something in this even she didn’t understand. Tyler made her smile. They’re all quite beautiful when they’re young. She thought that under that T-shirt and jeans Tyler would be a kouros, hairless, flawless, for the time being, anyway. The poets at Hopkins were all soft bodies and serious minds.

  The hotel was the opposite of haunted. There were no memories there. The place had never seen an assignation, nor a declaration of love or hatred, nor a business deal, a night of martinis to cap off a weeklong binge. It was a way station, a void, horizontal lines and musty upholstery, staff with eyes that weren’t even sad—sadness would be interesting—just blank. The man at the desk: his patter seemed rehearsed. She took the elevator though there were only three floors.

  The room’s curtains were brown; even an interior designer would hesitate to christen them cocoa, or tobacco, or mocha, or loam. The view had some promise, there was a park at the center of town, at best a charming public good, at worst the rubicon that divided the campus from the rest of the people who lived in this place: laid-off autoworkers, cleaning ladies, the hairnetted men and women who served the food in the institution’s three cafeterias.

  Rebecca herself had worked in the student mailroom, filling out little slips of paper that she’d slide into lucky students’ mailboxes to let them know L.L.Bean had sent that cable-knit sweater, Eddie Bauer had sent those back-ordered boots, that the fat package of cassette tapes had finally arrived from Columbia House. She couldn’t remember the wage, but she remembered she shopped at the thrift stores, though so did everyone else in that city overrun with people like her: a class that lived in poverty but were not condemned to it. They’d return to Boston, Ohio, New Hampshire, years later, as the parents of incoming students, in expensive cars fitted with racks to hold skis, and feel nostalgic about the Salvation Army’s particular funk: sweat, dusty cloth, desperation, and cigarette smoke. That’s who she would be, in four years’ time, when Jacob went off to school. She had made it.

  She sent away Tyler with the assurance that they’d see each other the next day, when she was scheduled to visit the classroom and field questions. She left the hotel with a deferential uptick of the eyebrows to the man behind the desk. She did not want to be anywhere near that man and that lobby, which reminded her of those phantom, windowless rooms on the upper floors of department stores, displaying rugs, mattresses, furniture designed and sold in coordinating sets.

  She found a coffee shop, and Rebecca opened her book on the table but didn’t read. She ate her chicken salad sandwich and wished she were the sort of woman who carried a toothbrush in her purse. She ought to think about what she was going to say that night, something valedictory, something grandiose, that would make those people in the audience unaware of her think: this was a woman deserving of platitudes.

  She ordered a cup of tea to take away. It was nice enough outside to feel spring feverish. Rebecca had been at Hopkins for long enough to be accustomed to how young college students looked but this crop was different, more homogenous, wealthier, more coddled. These were kids, cigarette smoking, boisterously laughing, hurriedly walking or luxuriously ambling kids. Jacob wouldn’t have stuck out in this particular crowd, that’s how young they seemed. The country’s future leaders, or anyway, the ones who’d shoulder the taxes that allowed society to continue on its merry way.

  It helped, when speaking, when writing, to have your intended audience, your fat woman on a porch. Rebecca supposed Karen, sardonic, aimless Karen, was hers. Once, it had been Priscilla, but maybe that was one more of Rebecca’s flights of fancy. She’d known the woman for three years; she’d been dead for ten. Rebecca and Priscilla had shared salads and laughter and a son but maybe nothing else. Maybe every intimacy was just wishful thinking. There were days Rebecca could barely remember what Priscilla looked like. She’d try to conjure Priscilla but come up with only Cheryl.

  Rebecca had reached the limit of the campus. There were modern buildings from the 1970s alongside gracious edifices from decades past; there was lovely landscaping and people on bicycles. She took out her pencil, a notebook, because sometimes the performance of work proved productive, but nothing came to mind. Maybe that was what she’d talk about that night: stand at that podium, offer thanks to the college, to the magazine, to Jim, to the Jameson Foundation, and remind everyone: this all passes. Hug your spouse; kiss your sleeping kids’ foreheads, even though you know they wouldn’t want you to. A plane flew high overhead and Rebecca thought about Christopher. His work was as much an act of imagination as hers. He believed there was some moral debt owed. Rebecca liked the smaller world in which she was a person of consequence. She put the pencil away, went inside, found Jim’s office, the door standing open, the tall man in the monkish cell on display like an animal at a zoo. She knocked on the doorframe, tentative.

  “Rebecca Stone.” He drew his body up to its full height. The desk was messy in an unembarrassed way. The room smelled of yellowing paper.

  What was intended, a hug or a handshake? Rebecca split the difference with an outstretched arm and a forward lean. Jim took her hand and pulled her close. He was thin and bony, strong and capable. Rebecca wished he were fatter, that his body didn’t so closely recall Christopher’s.

  “It’s so wonderful to meet you at last. Of course, I feel like we’re old friends.”

  “Aren’t we?” Rebecca had mostly lost her power to charm. This was not flirtation but honesty.

  “Well, we published you for the first time five years ago. So it’s been at least that long that we’ve known each other.”

  Rebecca couldn’t tell him that, years before, she’d left Jacob with Priscilla one Saturday and taken the train to Philadelphia to hear Jim speak at a conference. It had to have been twelve years now. Jim was not much changed. More white in the hair, more tautness to the face. Rebecca knew that she would be unrecognizable to anyone who only knew her from that one day, but fortunately no one had known her, that day. “Well, I trust you with my work, so you know me better than most.”

  “You had a good flight? Sit, sit.” Jim jabbed at the general disarray on the desk. There were postcards taped to the wall and two plants on the sill, basking in the afternoon sun. “Tyler met you without a problem? You’re OK at the hotel?”

  “It’s lovely. Tyler was very sweet.”

  “A promising writer.” Jim dropped his voice. “They’re rare. You teach. You understand. But Tyler might actually have something there. Only time will tell. You know that, too.”

  “My students come in so eager to become something that I never have the heart to tell them how long it actually takes.”

  “There’s nothing worse than being fully formed at that age. But they confuse success with the rest of it.”

  “Mine think of publishing as some sort of transcendent act. A blessing from God. A miracle. Water into wine.”

  Jim chuckled. “What’s the point of youth without ambition? Anyway, you’re still young.”

  “I throw The New Yorker away every month. At least I read most of the poems. But it goes into the garbage. And I don’t feel young, though thank you for it. The word, I believe, is midcareer. That’s a nice euphemism.”

  “You were a kid when you got started! I looked it up. I’ve been boning up on Rebecca Stone.”

  “I was almost thirty. I just had a student come to my office hours and complain about Best American Poetry. He thought they weren’t reading the right journals. He felt overlooked. Imagine feeling overlooked at twenty-two! Twenty-two-year-olds are the only people anyone cares about.”

  “Let’s walk. I’ve got office hours at three, but we should get some fresh air.”

  They left the office, the dignified enough basement that was nevertheless a basement. The day was cool. “The walls here have ears.”

  Rebecca fell into step beside him. The place had the quiet purpose of many people engaged in a single endeavor: thought. There was another plane overhead and some gathering clouds.

  “I can’t tell you, what an honor
it is.”

  “You should get used to it. You know I think the world of your work, but that secret is out. The National Book Award! We want to publish as much of it as possible, I hope you won’t forget about us. The kids don’t know, they think it’s so competitive out there, but there are so few of us who make it this far. People give it up. It’s a vice. They get married and have kids and they become interested in more interesting things, more remunerative things, or they realize that there’s nothing left to say.”

  “I got married, I had kids. It was like an infection. I can tell the serious writers from the less serious writers because for the one it’s a compulsion. An illness. Or unhealthy, almost, anyway.”

  “Did you ever stop? I went to the Peace Corps. Benin. I don’t know what I thought I would get there but I wanted so badly to get away from myself. I was twenty-three, myself was all I had.”

  “I didn’t know that. Have you written about it?”

  “It seems pointless. It wasn’t a teaching experience. It wasn’t something to write about. It was a hiatus. A reset. A hibernation.”

  “It’s like having a child, actually.”

  “But you wrote about that, didn’t you?”

  “I guess. My husband says my poetry isn’t about anything but poetry itself. Ex-husband, I mean.” She felt that need to clarify. Because, part of her wondered. That night, there would be table wine, one red, one yellow. There would be subpar chicken and there would be her speech. There would be handshakes for the people at the Jameson Foundation and there would be the silent, judgmental congratulations of the assembled undergraduates, the faculty emeriti who had nowhere better to be, the locals from the prosperous suburbs who were interested in literature. Perhaps Jim would see her back to the hotel. It was a hike, from the reception, if any distance in a college town could be considered a hike, and the beacons of blue-lit telephones were testament to the fact that even here, in the groves of academe, dangers lurked. A woman was better off escorted by a man. Perhaps he’d suggest a drink at the bar. Perhaps one scotch would become a second and a third, perhaps the defenses would draw down enough that he could admit to her that he had hoped for this, and his hand would be on her knee, or her waist, and his breath would be hot as he confessed it. Perhaps, Rebecca, drunk also on the power of her own accomplishment, would lead him by the hand—what was to be ashamed? they were unmarried!—to the third floor of the hotel and show him that vantage on the small town where he would while away the remaining days of his small life.