Keep the Baby, Faith

by William L. DeAndrea

  I asked if L. Burke was expecting us.

  “She knows we’re coming.” Lucille used keys: a Fichet on the top lock, a Rabson on the bottom, a Medeco on the one in the middle.

  That was a good three hundred dollars’ worth of locks. Nobody could be that protective of merely her life. “What does she keep in here? The Crown Jewels?” Lucille chuckled, the first time I’d heard her do that.

  It was a studio apartment, standard New York issue for buildings of that vintage. Room, about twelve by eighteen, kitchen (stove, the bottom half of a refrigerator, sink), and a bathroom. One window, fronting the street, ancient air conditioner stuck into the wall under half of it, heating register under the other half. An apartment like this now costs about seven hundred dollars a month to rent, depending on the neighborhood.

  “How do you like it?” Lucille said. She sounded like someone who’s just given you a birthday present.

  I looked around. When you live in a studio apartment, you have a choice. You can have a living room (condemning yourself to a lifetime of sleeping on one of those wretched fold-out sofas), or you can have a bedroom, leaving yourself open to misinterpretation every time you have somebody visit. This place was a bedroom. A good portion of the twelve by eighteen was taken up with a double-sized bed in white pine, with a quilted white spread. There were matching bedside tables, with plain white lamps on them. The carpet, where it was visible, was blue, one of the plush carpets that were so big in the seventies, the kind with no discernible pile, just an undifferentiated sea of fuzz.

  Not much of the carpet was visible—the rest of the place looked like somebody’s attic. There were trunks, in various stages of decrepitude, with the occasional sleeve or piece of frill sticking out from the crack of a closed lid. No bookshelves, but piles of books, tottering structures of indiscriminately mixed hardcovers and paperbacks that looked as if they’d fall over at the first puff of air. Stacks of magazines, too. Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Grayness Sunday Magazine. Scrapbooks. There were stuffed animals and dolls. There were little pieces of porcelain covered in dust (the whole place was dusty; no one had been in here in weeks) and set down on any available surface. There were records, albums and singles, but nothing to play them on.

  I turned to Lucille. “I love it,” I said. “I lived in one of the clones of this place my first two years in New York.”

  “So did I.”

  “The decor was different, though. I had comic books strewn all over the—”

  She was laughing. I spent a good part of the day in this woman’s presence, and she’d been gasping and smiling and frowning and giggling and chuckling, but this was the first display of emotion from her I was willing to bet was genuine.

  Now was the time to say something brilliant. I did not rise to the occasion. “You’re L. Burke,” I said.

  She nodded. “I was. For a while. Before I was Lucille Letron. After,” she added, “I got tired of being Lucille Berkowitz.”

  This was not my night to shine. I responded to this with four words I thought I’d never say. “You don’t look Jewish.”

  She pointed to the pile of scrapbooks. “Go take a look at my old nose,” she said. “This one’s only about six years old.”

  I looked. I don’t know why I wasn’t willing to take her word for it. The first thing I opened to was a clipping with the headline Area Students in Dance Recital, and there was little Lucille Berkowitz, one of the soloists, executing a jeté, her old nose cleaving the air ahead of her. A few pages later, there was a front-page headline that said: HIGH SCHOOL JUNIOR WINS NATIONAL SCIENCE PRIZE. There was a picture of her with an award. There were lots more clippings. Not all of them had pictures, but there was plenty of evidence.

  Yes, I thought, this is the reason there are no poor plastic surgeons. Old noses make the difference. Here I’d been figuring her for Superwasp, and she turned out to be another Westchester Jew. Just like me. The only differences were, I still had my old nose, and my name job had been performed before I had a chance to do anything about it.

  “You have me at your mercy, you know,” she said.

  I told her I didn’t see how.

  “They don’t know.”

  “Who doesn’t know about what?”

  “The family doesn’t know about this apartment. Doesn’t know about my past. You could destroy them if you told on me. Especially if you told Alma. She almost disowned Robert for marrying me because she thinks I’m Protestant. The Letrons are old French stock, you know. Staunch Catholics. She might have succeeded in getting it called off if Paul didn’t put his foot down. Paul was—is—a hell of a nice guy. The family knows how messed up they’re going to be without him.”

  “Bully for them,” I said. “How did you bring it off? What did you tell your parents?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. By the time I was out of college, I’d lost touch with them, anyway. My parents were the children of business partners who got married because their fathers said they should, and they weren’t really into it, if you know what I mean. They were divorced when I was ten. I don’t know where my father is. My mother stuck it out until I was safely into Smith, then took off to San Francisco to come out of the closet.”

  She looked at me. “Not ‘The Goldbergs,’ is it?”

  “What did you tell the Letrons?”

  “I told them I was an orphan. I was working for Austin Stoddard & Trapp as an assistant editor when I met Robert in the bar of the Westbrook.”

  “That’s practically a cliché,” I said.

  She nodded soberly. “It is, isn’t it? Out of Smith, into publishing; it’s practically required.”

  “You told him you were an orphan.”

  “I might as well be. My mother sends a birthday card here every September, and I send her one back in February, if I remember. This place comes in handy as a mail drop. I pay for it out of my allowance. Robert thinks I spend all that money getting my hair done.” She said it as though it were an endearing trait of Robert’s. As if she wanted to tack the phrase “the big lug” onto the end of the sentence, but didn’t because she was too used to talking to classy people. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when they tear the building down.”

  “You could rent a post office box for five dollars a month,” I told her.

  “Yes, but when I took up with Robert, when I met Alma, I knew I’d have to leave little Lucille Berkowitz behind. Lucille Burke was close to her, just cosmetic changes, really, a better name, a better nose. Lucille Letron couldn’t have anything to do with little Miss Berkowitz. Do you understand?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Look. I liked little Lucille. She had a basically miserable childhood, but she was an achiever, she did a lot of neat stuff for an unwanted little girl with a big nose. She taught Lucille Burke how to get what she wanted, and Ms. Burke did. I just don’t want to lose complete touch with the kid, you know?”

  “And yet you risk it all,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As you said, you’re at my mercy. I could walk out of here, make one phone call and end it all for you.”

  “After all this time, I don’t think Robert would mind. Alma would want to kill me, but Robert and I are habits with each other. He knows I like to spend money, and I know he likes to stand out in the woods chopping things while mosquitoes bite him. He takes care of me when I get too neurotic, and I soothe him and go fetch his ampoule when his angina acts up. So I think we’d survive this.”

  “It wouldn’t be pleasant,” I said.

  “No.”

  “It would be very inconvenient.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why tell me?”

  “Because I want you to understand. About Faith. I figured you would be the one to tell. I would talk to you about Faith, and you would understand.”

  “Why?”

  Her lovely Wasp face said she couldn’t believe it. “Because we’re all alike, can’t you see? Middle-class kids from middle-class lives, t
rying to get to the top of something. You with your glamorous career with a powerful newspaper. Faith and I marrying money. Faith just did a better job of it than I did.”

  “A better job.”

  “Can you blame me for resenting her? I made myself over, and stored my past in a little walkup to get close to the Letrons. I tried to be what they thought they wanted, especially what Robert and his mother wanted. Nouveaux riches are always the worst snobs, so I gave them blond and Waspy, and despite all the non-Catholic business, they loved it.

  “But Faith. Faith just had to be her own sweet, helpless, pitiful little self. And she not only got everything I’d gotten, she got the best brother, as well. Of course I resent her.”

  “You wanted Paul.”

  “The minute I met him. He had the money, he had the power, he had the brains. Unfortunately, I had already let Robert make me pregnant by then.”

  “You have a child?” Faith had never mentioned it.

  “Miscarriage, thank God. With my luck, the little monster would have had my old nose, and everyone would have wondered where it came from. And he would have been an unnatural, poisonous wretch, like his grandmother. Like both his grandmothers.”

  She moved a little closer to me. I could smell perfume, faint, but spicy-sweet. “I wanted you to understand, Harry. We’re all alike, you, me and Faith. I wanted you to understand.”

  “I’m not like you,” I said.

  “But you like me.”

  “I don’t like you.”

  “But you want me.” She touched my cheek. It burned.

  I should have resisted her, I suppose. But this woman had gotten under my skin the first instant I saw her, and somehow, learning she was not the embodiment of my Wasp fantasies after all (she was the embodiment of her Wasp fantasies), only made it worse. Besides, since the Great Heartbreak of my life ten months ago, I had not touched or kissed a woman I wasn’t a blood relative of, and if you don’t think that makes a difference, you are more than human, or less, and God bless you.

  So we kissed and undressed and climbed on the bed. Mrs. Letron knew what she wanted, and she knew what I wanted, and she was not shy about asking or giving. All around us was the presence of little Lucille Berkowitz, something I felt especially strongly at those moments the woman with me gave a shriek, or a dirty little laugh. At those moments, it felt like more than a tumble with a beautiful but irritating married woman. It was almost like an exorcism, or a sacrifice.

  It ended. It always does. Lucille wanted me to stay, but I had a vision of Faith and Sue’s expressions when I walked in in the morning after staying away all night, and said I couldn’t.

  Lucille sighed. “All right. We must do it again sometime.” She had that smug smile on her face, the one women get when they think they’ve put one over on you and made you like it. She sat naked on the bed and watched me as I dressed. There was no need for me to wear a tie now. Tying it just gave me something to concentrate on, so I wouldn’t have to answer her.

  Lucille got off the bed and pressed her tall body against my suit and gave me a long slow kiss before I left. She seemed satisfied, which is what a man with sufficiently raised consciousness is always hoping to see. I was satisfied.

  I hoped Lucille’s demons were.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I MET WITH PETER Letron the next day, but a lot earlier than originally planned, and in a different place, and for a different reason.

  The day started calmly enough, over bowls of farina for breakfast. I’m not a hot-cereal fan, but that stuff was terrific. Sue cooked it. I’d never seen her or heard of her cooking anything before, and I had a big-brother flash of suspicion—what’s my baby sister been doing in college, getting all this practice at cooking breakfast? I was a fine one to talk, after last night.

  Thinking about last night made me realize that what I was experiencing right now might be a certain amount of little-sister suspicion. I thought I’d just been lucky to avoid questions. The girls had been asleep when I got back last night, or they’d pretended to be. And this morning, there hadn’t been a word about Lucille Letron. That just wasn’t natural. If I was one of those people whose brain awakes at the same time their bodies do, I would have seen it a lot sooner.

  That made me feel compelled to talk about it. I said I had a nice dinner, that we’d spoken about the financial and other aspects of the situation from both points of view, and that Lucille seemed to be on the level, but I was buying nothing from her without a lengthy test drive.

  “One thing that occurred to me,” I went on, “is that you could probably win Lucille over.”

  Faith stopped with the spoon halfway to her mouth. Milk and grains of farina made little splashes as they fell back into the bowl. It’s hard for a pregnant woman to be haughty in a huge terry-cloth robe, while she’s splashing milk around the table, but Faith managed it. “Why should I want to win that woman over?”

  “I didn’t say you should want to, I said you probably could. If you did want to.”

  “How?”

  “How do you feel about the company? Is it a heritage you want your child to have? I mean, is it going to matter to you if the kid would rather be a nursery school teacher than a cosmetics tycoon?”

  “Of course not. Children should do whatever they want.”

  That was encouraging. I told her Lucille’s fears about Robert running the company into the ground, and her fears that Faith, as chief trustee (another little fact from the French facsimiles), would let him, or that she would boot Robert out altogether, and possibly hire somebody worse.

  “That’s none of her business!”

  “I know. For God’s sake, Faith, what did you want when you came to me? A preemptive guerrilla strike on your husband’s family? Napalm? Neutron bombs?”

  “That’s what they’re trying to do to me.”

  “It’s possible. It’s maybe even likely. I would not be flabbergasted to learn that the old lady has been spreading a little money around to people who hurt people for money.”

  “I’m sure she has.”

  “All right. It’s going to be difficult to do anything about her without some help from inside the family. Since I personally am not into killing people…” I gave Faith a chance to say she wasn’t either, but she neglected to take advantage of it. “… And I don’t have enough money to hire somebody…” The idea that Faith did have enough crossed my mind, but I put it aside as unworthy. “… What needs to be done is to get her put away. And you can’t do that without help from the family.”

  “I don’t need their help. They’re all in it.”

  I started to formulate a lecture to the effect that while paranoia in many circumstances was normal, and even healthy, sometimes, it was a great big pain in the ass. I decided to save it for a time when the audience would be more receptive.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll grant you they’re worthless, all right? They’re drones, human parasites. But the key word here is human. And humans worry about the future. Especially parasites and drones, because they’re incapable of taking care of it for themselves.”

  “My God,” my sister said helpfully. “That almost makes sense.” Faith didn’t say anything, but she was still looking at me, ready to listen.

  I made the most of it. I told her I wasn’t trying to push her into any position she didn’t want to occupy, but that I felt Lucille, and probably Peter and Louis, were plenty scared of Alma themselves, and that they would all feel a lot better disposed toward Faith if she made it clear she’d listen (on behalf of the kid, of course) to merger offers from big companies, should they come, and that she might even be willing to take the right one, should it come. It was the longest sentence I’ve ever constructed.

  Faith mumbled something. Sue begged her pardon.

  “I’ll think about it!” Faith said. She looked around, as if to see who was yelling, then mumbled again, something about going to get dressed.

  Because today was a momentous occasion: we were Going Out. All o
f us, Faith included. It was Sue’s idea, but I went along with it. Faith already felt as if she were under attack, but there was no need for her to feel like a prisoner, too. Not that the trip was scheduled to be especially strenuous. We were going down to Lexington and Thirty-fourth Street to visit the gynecologist.

  Dr. Barbara Metzenbaum was Sue’s gynecologist, but Sue was willing to lend her out for the duration of Faith’s pregnancy. Now, you may be wondering why a young woman who lives in Scarsdale and attends college in Syracuse has a gynecologist in Manhattan. All the Westchester coeds above a certain income level do it. Why? To get diaphragms without their mothers’ finding out, is the big reason. The summer before they take off for college is when it usually happens.

  We knew from the folks at the hospital that Faith was healthy as a horse, but there was still no doctor lined up to deliver the baby. Sue didn’t know if Dr. Metzenbaum did obstetrics as well as diaphragm distribution, but even if she didn’t, she’d be able to refer Faith to someone who did.

  No referrals were necessary. Dr. Metzenbaum apparently delivered all the Yuppie babies on the East Side between Fiftieth Street and the Village, except those whose parents were blood relatives of rival obstetricians.

  The whole trip was very educational. I learned, for instance, that a young man who walks into a gynecologist’s waiting room with two attractive young women of the same age, one of them obviously pregnant, gets some funny looks from the other patients. Especially when the nurse summons and they both go in. I thought of making a general announcement that one of them was my sister, but that would only have made things worse.

  Sue and Faith came out of the office smiling, which I took as a sign of good news. I was all set to ask them for particulars when the white-coated young woman stuck her head out the Dutch door and said, “Mr. Ross? Would you come in here for a moment?”

  I pointed to my chest. “Me?”

  It was a stupid question, since I was the only man in the room, but she answered it. “Mr. Harry Ross, yes.” Then I really got some funny looks.