The fact that she had gotten pregnant a little before the wedding was not a cause for great concern. Indeed, Bob’s new mother-in-law, upon learning that she was soon to have a grandchild, had said with a wink, “The first baby doesn’t always take nine months.” If Patricia Whalen had really thought about it, she surely would have determined that Eve must have been pregnant before she met Bob. But Patricia clearly did not want to think about it. Daniella knew, of course, but everyone else assumed the baby was simply the product of a very whirlwind romance. As Eve’s pregnancy progressed, even Bob began to feel as if the baby really was his, if not biologically then spiritually.
Eve had told him she was pregnant during their first dinner together, the day after she had turned herself in and was informed that all outstanding charges would be dropped and no new ones pressed, as long as she was willing to share any and all information she had on any member of Smash, living or deceased. And as long as she was willing to testify for the state should a fugitive member be caught and brought to trial.
Bob had taken her to Jim White’s Half Shell at Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, where she had ordered the flounder and he the stone crabs. She had turned down the glass of wine from the bottle he had ordered, a Chablis recommended by Jim White himself. It was then that she told him that she was expecting and that the child was Warren’s, Warren who had blown himself to pieces only a few days previous. She told him that Warren had wanted her to get rid of it—that he knew someone who could perform the abortion, but that she just couldn’t destroy the life growing inside her.
“Of course you can’t,” he said, resting his hand on top of hers.
She smiled.
“You know,” he said, and then he paused, his confession poised on the tip of his tongue. Was he really going to share his most shameful secret with this woman he barely knew? But he felt he did know her. He felt, in fact, that he had been waiting for her ever since he lost Marian. “None of us are perfect. That’s the human condition. I was not faithful to Marian. I was unfaithful even while she was in Europe, on the tour that ended in her death. I’ve always felt that if I had been a better husband, maybe, maybe she wouldn’t have signed up for such a long trip abroad, and then she wouldn’t have been on that flight, and her life wouldn’t have ended so tragically, so early.”
“My mother’s best friend died at Orly, too,” said Eve. “My aunt Pooh.”
They were holding hands now, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes.
“You know what, Bob? It was a fucking fantastic adventure they were on. Fucking fantastic. Marian would have seized the opportunity to take an art tour of Europe regardless of whether or not you were a perfect husband. Don’t you think?”
He was grateful for her reassurance and the fact that she did not judge him for his past sins. Still, he cringed at her crass language. But how could she help it? She was still shedding the trappings of the seedy underworld she had been pulled down into, all the while offering him absolution.
“Eve,” he said gently. “You don’t have to use their vulgarity anymore. You don’t have to pretend to be some Marxist lunatic in order to survive. You’re out. The nightmare is over.”
She looked momentarily confused. He imagined how hard it must be for her to trust that the underworld wasn’t going to suck her back in.
“Thank you,” she finally said, letting out a long sigh. “Thank you for that. Thank you for not just seeing me as who I was—when I was with them. God. I wish Mother and Daddy could see me through your eyes.”
Here was a girl as beautiful as Marian had been, a girl who, like him, knew what it meant to experience exile, to suffer.
“When I see you, dear Eve, I don’t picture what you might have once done wrong; I see a woman taking great risks to save herself. And her child,” he continued, smiling.
She started crying, dabbing at her eyes with her white napkin, gazing at him with a look of pure gratitude through her tears.
“Don’t think of this baby as his,” he said suddenly. “He gave up paternity the moment he suggested you terminate. This is your baby, growing in you.”
And when he proposed just a few weeks after that first dinner, he asked if he might claim the baby as his, as theirs.
• • •
On their wedding night, after they consummated their marriage, he told her, “You are now flesh of my flesh, Mrs. Evelyn Whalen Powers, till death do us part.” How could that not include the child that was growing within her? Later even the baby would cooperate, maintaining the illusion of Bob’s paternity by arriving three weeks later than expected.
After a grueling labor that left Eve so depleted of blood she had to have a transfusion, baby Anna was delivered at Piedmont Hospital on December 1, 1972. Nine pounds and two ounces of perfect pink flesh, she had heart-shaped lips and cornflower-blue eyes. Her full name was Joannah Ella Powers, Joannah after Bob’s mother and Ella in honor of Daniella. Anna was an easy baby who slept through the night after two months. Eve claimed she was most content when placed on a blanket in the backyard, observing the goings-on around the huge white oak tree that offered so much shade. Birds flitted on, off, and around the branches, all while baby Anna watched. “Our little birder,” Eve said. Bob thought that Eve should have help, and Eve finally agreed when her parents suggested that Ada switch with Maggie, so that Ada, who had practically raised Eve, could help raise Anna.
“We have to pay Ada a true living wage,” Eve had insisted, and Bob smiled indulgently and agreed to pay her sixteen dollars a day, nearly a 100 percent raise.
Ada worked for the Powerses five days a week, from nine to five. During the hours that the baby slept, she cleaned and prepped food for the family’s supper. Bob encouraged Eve to use her free time to join a tennis team or perhaps the Junior League. Eve balked. “Babe,” she said. “I’m really not Junior League material. They’re not exactly looking for someone who once had an outstanding warrant for her arrest.”
Bob assured her that if she wanted to join the Junior League, she most certainly could (his own mother had once been the president of the Atlanta chapter). But if she felt it wasn’t a good fit, that was fine; she would soon enough find a group she felt comfortable joining. And indeed, shortly after that conversation, she deepened her involvement at St. Luke’s Episcopal, the downtown church she insisted they transfer their membership to, saying All Saints’ was her parents’, St. Philip’s was his and Marian’s, and St. Luke’s could be their own.
A member at St. Luke’s had recently started a soup kitchen in the church basement. Eve would go there to serve the homeless two mornings a week, a form of penance, it seemed to Bob. She spent a lot of time painting, too, setting up an easel in the upstairs sun porch of their Ansley Park home, just off their bedroom. She painted portraits mostly, picture after picture of baby Anna, as well as portraits of the homeless men she fed at St. Luke’s. For Eve’s birthday, Bob signed her up for painting classes at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, located in the old Candler house where his parents had once attended parties when it was a private residence.
Every month or so Eve got together with Daniella, either the two ladies on their own or joined by Bob and Pete. When it was the four of them they would go to the Colonnade (Bob and Pete both loved their chicken livers) or to Nino’s, but when Eve and Daniella were on their own they liked to go to Gene & Gabe’s, a flamboyant place where the atmosphere was a little swishy for Bob’s taste.
Three months after Eve delivered Anna, she came home from dinner with Daniella, thrilled to inform Bob that Daniella was expecting.
“How wonderful that you girls will be able to share the experience of motherhood,” Bob said. “Though I suppose this means we’ll soon be looking for a new associate.”
“Daniella says she’ll go back to work as soon as she can,” said Eve. “I was surprised, too. But here’s a thought we had at dinner: What if, once Daniella goes back, she drops the baby off with us during the day? We’ll have to ask Ada, of cours
e, but I’m sure she won’t mind. Daniella says she’ll pay her extra, and Anna’s going to need a playmate soon enough. It’s perfect, really. Daniella’s baby will only be a little younger than Anna is.”
“Fine by me,” said Bob. “Let’s just hope Daniella has a girl, so there won’t be a little football player running circles around our daughter.”
“Oh, Bob,” said Eve, her eyes shining with happiness as she put her arms around him. “I feel like my life is finally coming together.”
Part Two
Their Daughters
Chapter 13
ASTRAL PROJECTION
Atlanta, 1983
I don’t remember Mom talking so much about money when Dad was alive. But I was only six when he died, so maybe she did and I was just too young to notice. After Dad’s accident, she started talking about money all of the time. I remember her bringing it up as soon as we returned home from Mimi and Papa’s house, where we had gone for two weeks after the funeral so that Mom could let her own mother take care of us.
“You and I are a team, Sarah,” she said, placing a bowl of Campbell’s Chunky beef soup in front of me for dinner. “And as a team we’re going to need to tighten our belts.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, digging around with my spoon for a carrot.
“Just that we are going to have to keep on a tight budget and not buy anything unless we really need it. And we probably won’t be going on any more fancy vacations. And I’ll hold off on buying that Mercedes convertible.”
Mom was joking about vacations and the Mercedes, trying to make me smile. She always said people who drove luxury cars were silly—even though her best friend, my aunt Eve, drove a Mercedes. And we never went on fancy trips, just to Georgetown to visit Papa and Mimi and up to Connecticut to visit Grammy Strum. Well, and we always went to the beach for a week each summer, but it was Daddy who loved the ocean—much more so than Mom ever did—so I figured we probably wouldn’t be going to Florida anymore. Turned out I was right about that.
Soon after Mom’s talk about tightening our belts, she installed a mini fridge and a hot plate in the guest room, which was in the basement, and started renting it out as a studio apartment. It had its own bathroom and its own entrance, so we didn’t really notice our tenant, a shy graduate student in the English department at Emory. Mom also stopped getting her hair colored. She still looked pretty, but she looked a lot older now that her dark hair was streaked with so much gray, especially when she stood beside Aunt Eve, whose hair was always bright blond.
Mom and Eve are like that—opposites. Like, they each say no to opposite sorts of things. Mom says no to private school, cable television, Jordache jeans, Laura Ashley bedspreads, anything that she thinks “costs too much money,” which is pretty much everything.
Aunt Eve rarely says no when it comes to buying little things for Anna and me, unless she decides something is “age inappropriate.” On Wednesday afternoons, which she keeps open so she can spend special time with us, she usually takes us shopping—sometimes to Lenox Square Mall, sometimes to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center. Usually when we go to Lenox, we just browse at Rich’s and Davison’s, get ice cream at Häagen-Dazs, and play with the puppies at the pet store. But the last time we were there, Aunt Eve bought Anna the coolest jacket. She said it was an early birthday gift, though Anna’s birthday was months away. The jacket was made of pale pink satin with a life-size Jordache horse head embroidered on the back. I really wanted the matching one in lavender, though I acted like I didn’t care that much about it, because I could tell Aunt Eve felt guilty about buying something so nice for Anna in front of me. She probably would have bought me the lavender one, but she knew Mom would have thrown a fit.
On the days when we go to Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, we’ll hit Baskin-Robbins first (Aunt Eve says the three of us are “a bunch of ice-cream addicts”), then spend the rest of the afternoon at Oxford Books. While Aunt Eve knows not to buy me clothes, she buys Anna and me as many books as we want. If we want to buy four or five apiece, Aunt Eve won’t even blink. She’ll just say something about how wonderful it is that we are both such “avid readers.” That is, unless we try to get her to buy us a Lois Duncan thriller, which she swears will put “sinister ideas” into our heads and give us nightmares. I’ve already read three Lois Duncan books, and while they creeped me out, they didn’t give me nightmares or anything. Still, Aunt Eve refused to purchase Stranger with My Face, even though I promised her that Mom wouldn’t mind.
The next weekend Mom took me to the public library so I could check out a copy. In that way, Aunt Eve is the one always saying no while Mom says yes. Like, Anna can’t walk anywhere by herself even though she’s almost eleven and Aunt Eve refused to let her go see Poltergeist, even though Mom took me to see it.
• • •
Last night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I finished Stranger with My Face. It’s about a girl, Laurie, who was adopted when she was little. She lives in this seaside village where everyone knows everyone. One night her boyfriend thinks he sees her out on the beach with another guy. But Laurie was home sick. It turns out that Laurie has a twin sister, Lia, who she was separated from when they were just babies. And Lia knows how to astral project, which is when you sort of will your soul out of your body, so that your soul is free to travel anywhere. When Laurie’s boyfriend thought he saw her on the beach with another guy, it was Lia he was seeing.
Well, it turns out that Lia is evil. She killed her foster sister and is now in a mental institution. But Laurie doesn’t know this. Not yet. All she knows is that Lia is teaching her how to astral project. It takes a long time for Laurie to learn, but finally she does. And then when Laurie’s soul is outside of her body, astral projecting, Lia’s soul jumps into it and takes over. Luckily, her little sister recognizes how different “Laurie” is acting and together with Laurie’s boyfriend, Jeff, they figure out how to drive Lia out with the Navajo charm Laurie was given earlier in the book.
Aunt Eve was right; the book did scare me. So much so that after I finished I crept into Mom’s bed and slept curled up next to her. But it also made my brain spin with ideas. I wasn’t thinking about Laurie and Lia’s story so much as I was thinking about astral projection and how I might learn to do it. If I could figure it out, I could go anywhere and my mom wouldn’t even know. I would just do my projecting at night while she slept.
The thing is, I don’t really want to visit my grandparents or go to California or anything like that. I want to project myself to the place where the souls of dead people go. I’m not talking about heaven. I’m not even sure heaven exists. But I have this idea that Dad’s soul is sort of hanging around this world, hoping to catch glimpses of Mom and me. Maybe I could find him—just to say I love him. Just to say how sorry I was that I acted like such a brat the last time I saw him.
I was mad because he was going to this stupid book reading instead of going with Mom and me to see Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown like we’d planned. The chair of the history department at Emory was the one giving the reading. Dad explained that he had forgotten about the event when we made plans to go see the movie, and he was really sorry for the mistake, but he was up for full professor that year and he needed to do everything he could to get on the chair’s good side. He asked me to please understand. He asked me to please give him a hug good-bye. I wouldn’t.
“Love you, Sarah!” he called as he left the house. “Poop the door!”
That was an old joke from when I was really little and thought that saying “poop” was funny whether or not the sentence made any sense. But I didn’t even smile or look up. I just kept my eyes on the floor. And then on his way to the reading, someone ran the light at Piedmont and Monroe and hit his car. We hadn’t even left for the movie when we got the call. Mom and I rushed to Crawford Long, where they had taken Dad. He was in the intensive-care unit. They finally let Mom in, but I wasn’t allowed. Something about kids and germs. Mom gave me money to get a Sprite o
ut of the machine while she was gone. Later, after the doctor came to tell us he had died, Mom still didn’t want me to see him. She said his body was just too broken. She said it wasn’t really him lying there, anyway. That it was just his shell.
“Then where’s Daddy?” I asked. “If that’s not him?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. Then she added, “Wherever God is.”
It was the middle of the night when we got back to our house. Aunt Eve was waiting for us. Mom had called her from the pay phone at the hospital. Even though it was really late, Aunt Eve had fixed us pimento cheese sandwiches. I didn’t think I was hungry, but I ended up eating two.
• • •
The funeral was held at St. Luke’s because Aunt Eve was a member there and could arrange everything easily, and though Mom sometimes went to services at UUCA—the Unitarian church in Atlanta—she had never actually joined. Mom told Eve that she didn’t really care where the service was held as long as whoever presided over it didn’t try to convert new members during the homily by telling everyone to accept Jesus or else. “You know it’s not that kind of a church,” Aunt Eve had said.
The priest told stories about Dad, gathered from his colleagues at Emory, from Aunt Eve and Uncle Bob, from Grammy Strum, who stayed at Eve’s house while she was in town for the funeral because Mimi and Papa and Mom’s brother, my uncle Benjamin, who we almost never saw (he married a Japanese woman and lived in Kyoto), were all staying with us. And of course he told stories he learned from Mom. One of my favorites was about their first date.
They were both in college in New York. Mom was all dressed up in a silk blouse and a skirt with a crinoline underneath, and Dad had on a skinny tie. They were walking down Broadway, on their way to the subway station, when they heard mewing from behind some garbage cans. When they looked, they found a tiny orange-and-white kitty, defenseless and alone. They had dinner reservations in the Village, but of course they couldn’t leave the pitiful thing behind, so they got an empty cardboard box from a nearby liquor store and took the kitten back to Dad’s dorm, where Mom wasn’t allowed to go into his room with him because she was a girl. Dad ended up getting a friend to watch the kitty while they went to dinner, but not before Mom was kept waiting in the lobby for over twenty minutes. Still, Mom said his tender heart made her fall in love with him that very night.
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