by Amanda Cross
“Because it has made you fearful of Caroline’s defection. I have to say,” Kate went on, “that children seem to me notably unsatisfactory when it comes to the question of their parents. Between those who fantasize other parents and those who seek biological parents, it seems that no one is satisfied. Perhaps we ought to follow Plato’s suggestion and have a world where biological parentage is neither known nor significant.”
“I’m perfectly aware that my anxiety is irrational and illogical. As a lawyer, if not as a practical realist, how could I not be aware? I think that’s why I wanted to talk with you. You, I surmise, deal in stories like this. Caroline admires you and will probably speak to you about her ‘original appearance’ more intently than she has spoken to anyone else. Also–and I hope you will not desert me totally at this honesty–I did infer that, as a sister of the famous Fansler lawyers, you would hardly be, shall we say, a disruptive person.”
“Not disruptive, but not soothing either. I’m very unlike my brothers in every possible way; perhaps you’ve heard that. And if you’re expressing some naive belief in genes, let me point out the inefficacy of that attitude from an adoptive and loving parent.”
“Oh, dear, yes,” Tom Rayley said, in no way offended. “But that’s part of my fear, you see. How can I say it? That Caroline, discovering something, one hardly knows what, will fall out of our world and into some other world, to me unspeakable. And you, at least so far, while in another world, are not unspeakable. I understand your language; I can even learn it.”
Kate stared at him. “That is a remarkably intelligent thing to say,” she said. “I’m happy to talk with you, though Caroline is my friend, and I shall certainly talk to her also. But I am bewildered: What can you possibly think I can do for you? Isn’t this all between you and your wife and Caroline? Isn’t it all about the life you three have had together for all but a year and a half of Caroline’s existence?”
“You’ve heard the story then, the appearance from the bushes of the laughing child?”
“Yes. I’ve heard it from Caroline. As she’s heard it, and as it has been disputed and refined over the years. But she and I have not talked about it, not as you and I are talking now. It’s an amazing story certainly. Almost mythic.”
“Exactly. It’s myths I fear, you see. That’s the whole point. I don’t mind a bereft mother or even father appearing after all these years. I fear the power of the myth. I was wondering if you could detect it: demythologize it. Isn’t that what they do in literary criticism these days?”
“All I can do is talk to Caroline, which I do anyway. And to you, if an intelligent question occurs to me. But where can this lead, except around in the same circles? Caroline isn’t desperate for the truth, resting her whole identity and future life on some revelation. Your fears seem excessive.”
“They are. They are the fears that come with the youth of senility, as another lawyer once described it. Will you just accept my trepidation as part of your agenda, one of those ‘cases’ you think about?”
“I can do that certainly,” Kate said, half amused, half fearful of his intensity, inadequately masked. “What of the mother of the twins, the one who was reading Hardy? Is she still alive?”
“Oh yes, still a professor. And she’s never moved an inch from the story, nor have her children. It’s legend now, it’s a truth beyond truth.”
KATE HAD INTENDED to mention the conversation with Caroline’s father the next day, when she and Caroline walked home together, as was now their custom. They lived within a few blocks of one another but never, to their amusement, met except at the university. Those few blocks separated one New York City neighborhood from another. Caroline, however, mentioned the conversation first. Her father had called her the previous night to report upon the lunch he and Kate had shared. “The general hope, I’m to gather, is that you will come to dinner with the parents from time to time, and head off the effects of any terrible revelation, or the lack of such a revelation, upon their daughter. I hope you don’t feel unduly burdened. In the beginning, my appearance from the bushes seemed a good story; I don’t know why it has become so fearsome.”
“Stories of that sort do,” Kate said. “Like the moment after an electrical failure, when the bright lights go on and the candles are scarcely visible, superfluous. Here we are, talking now about your amazing appearance, while before we used to chat on about everything, nothing outshining the rest.”
“Do you mind?” Caroline asked.
“Partly. Partly I want to shout out that it doesn’t matter how you were born or miraculously shone forth; what matters is that you have a blessed life, and the chance for an interesting future. But then I know that’s nonsense. The question is, shall you be able eventually to forget the story, let it fade into the general history of things, or shall it keep, as they so wonderfully say in criticism today, foregrounding itself?”
“Certainly it will fade if it never changes, never gets any commentary added to it, never gets reinterpreted. Do you think you might be persuaded to go and see Henrietta Grant?”
“The mother of the twins, the one who was reading Hardy? What could I go to see her for? I could hardly request to hear the story again, as one might have asked a bard to recite the lines about Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa. I mean, if she wants to keep telling it, why not tell it to someone who hasn’t heard it before?”
“I don’t think she tells it much, or likes to. Mostly others tell it now, her children, me, Mom and Dad. It’s just that she’s got to be the answer.”
“The answer to where you came from?”
“Yes. She’s the only one who could possibly know.”
“Caroline, that’s obviously untrue. Unless she was in two places at once, and nothing in the story allows one to believe that, the only person who can possibly know is the one who set you off toward the volleyball players from behind the bushes and then crept away. And at least with the needle in the haystack, you supposedly know what haystack you lost the needle in.”
“You mean someone spotted that house, the children, the geography of the lawn, the dirt road, all of it, and just decided that was a good place to dump a baby.”
“That’s the likeliest explanation surely.”
“Perhaps. Except, Kate, I know I was a happy child, and all that, but if someone the child knows puts her down, is she likely to go running, happily gurgling the while, toward complete strangers in a strange place? I mean, she couldn’t have known the children, but mightn’t she have known the place?”
“You’re looking for a rational explanation, my dear. That is the great temptation with a story like this. As in the Gershwin song, where the Pharaoh’s daughter is suspected of being the mother of Moses, the baby she found. Surely the whole point about marvelous happenings is that there isn’t any explanation, anyway not one that would satisfy a rationalist. I think that’s why your father’s so worried; he half hopes for a rational explanation, and half fears the lack of one: if you consider yourself miraculous, even miraculously adventurous for a baby, you become otherworldly, part of legend, not simply his child.”
“Does that mean I ought to look for a mundane answer, or not?”
“Myself, I’d feel tempted to accept it just as it is: be glad you landed in that place, that your parents were there to claim you when called, that you were born at a later age than most, in an improbable way. It all seems to me a kind of blessing, better than fairy godmothers around your cradle. But who am I to talk, having always known exactly where I came from, and regretting it the greater part of the time? There is, you see, the danger that you will waste your energies on the past, and miss the present and the future. I think that’s often a danger, and one worth risking only under the most extreme conditions–total despair or anxiety, for example. What can you learn from the past before you burst upon that volleyball game that’s worth knowing? That’s what I’d ask myself.”
“There’s always plain old curiosity.”
“So there
is. But maybe that’s more my problem than yours. After all, I’ve made curiosity a kind of avocation. If you give me permission, I can promise to be curious enough for both of us.”
“Does that mean you might try to discover something?”
“Probably not. It means that I’ll go on wondering; you go on living.”
“Should your curiosity ever lead to any answers, will you promise to tell me? No, don’t protest,” Caroline said, as Kate started to speak. “Let’s make it a bargain. I’ll stop thinking about the whole scene, stop even telling it to new people I meet; I’ll just say I’m adopted and let it go at that. I think you’re right about the past entrenching itself in the present and future. But if I give up this wonderful question, you have, in turn, to promise to tell me if there ever is an answer. Agreed?”
Kate agreed, and with relief. The story was beginning to frighten her in the hold it was getting on Caroline and Tom Rayley. She called Tom Rayley and told him of the bargain, urging him to forget myths and concentrate on his satisfactory daughter.
And there for a time the matter rested.
THE RESURRECTION OF the myth was an outcome of Kate’s meeting with Henrietta Grant. They found themselves together on a panel, both last-minute substitutes; each, it later transpired, had agreed to fill in as a special favor, Henrietta to the remaining panelist, Kate to the man who had organized the panel in the first place. They were introduced five minutes before the panel began, each trying to remember where she had heard the other’s name. Both thought of Caroline as the connection during the first paper, and they nodded that recognition to one another as the man’s words on the New Historicism in the Renaissance prepared the way for Henrietta on the New Historicism in French writing of the eighteenth century and for Kate on English writers of the nineteenth.
“Shall we have a drink?” Henrietta asked when they had answered the last of the questions and watched the audience disperse. “Or do you feel duty bound to remain for the next panel?”
“Neither duty bound nor so inclined,” Kate answered. “After all, we are substitutes; it’s not as though we had signed on for the whole bit. And even if I had, the truth is I would like to have a drink with you.” They soon settled themselves in the bar of the hotel where the conference was being held. Kate felt she deserved a martini complete with olive.
“How is Caroline?” Henrietta asked. “I understand working with you has been a real opportunity. Not that I’ve seen her lately.”
“I wouldn’t call it an opportunity. We’re friends, which is a good thing. The fact is,” Kate added, as her martini and Henrietta’s Scotch arrived, “I never expected really to meet you, any more than I expected to come upon two sets of twelve-year-old twins playing volleyball. Or upon Huck and Jim on a raft, if it comes to that. Certain scenes live only in the imagination.”
“The twins are not that much younger than you,” Henrietta laughed. “My twins, at least, have turned out rather well. I’ve lost track of the other two, so they remain always twelve in my mind also. They moved away after that summer.”
“I wonder if they tell the story of Caroline’s arrival.”
“I’m pretty sure they do. They got used to telling it that summer. It’s not the sort of story you forget.”
“It’s all passed into legend by now. How does it feel to be part of a legend?”
“It was an amazing moment. I feel a kind of wonder about Caroline, as though, after that birth, as amazing and as charming in its way as that of Botticelli’s Venus, she was bound to be a marvel, do something that would reverberate, become, in her own way, a myth.”
“The birth of the hero, as Raglan and others have it, only this time a woman hero. More Moses than Eppie in Silas Marner. And of course the two sets of twins add a note, a kind of amazing circumstance.”
“Not really,” Henrietta laughed. “Think of the Bobbsey Twins. Just a convenient circumstance.” Henrietta looked for a moment down at her hands. “I do hope Caroline’s stopped brooding about it. I worry about the Rayleys; I worry about her. Like one of those babies conceived in vitro: How can anything in life equal its first moment? I mean, can a life hold two miracles?”
“The whole point of heroic lives is that they do, isn’t that so? The miraculous birth, therefore the awful and wonderful destiny. Not that I can imagine that for Caroline, who is such a sane person, which heroes rarely are.”
“Male heroes,” Henrietta said, and they went on to talk of other things.
But, the ice being broken, they met again from time to time, when Henrietta was in New York or Kate in Boston. And then one spring day Kate, finding herself at Williams College and remembering that Henrietta’s country house, on whose lawn Caroline had appeared that long-ago afternoon, was nearby, telephoned on the chance that Henrietta might be there, might ask her to stop by.
“Your sense of geography is rather wonderful,” Henrietta remarked. “I’m an hour at least away, and despite the careful directions I shall now give you, you will get lost. Stop and telephone again when you realize you’ve made a wrong turn. And plan to spend the night if you come at all. You’ll be far too late to drive anywhere today. I’m all alone, so there’s plenty of room. I’ll put you in the room where I was reading the day Caroline appeared.”
Kate did get lost, did call again, did arrive as the day was darkening, the trees beginning to be outlined against the evening sky. Kate drove down the dirt road on which Henrietta’s house stood, was shown the bushes that lined the property at its sides, and the lawn where the badminton net had been. Beyond the lawn was woods. The silence was amazing to Kate.
“Come in,” Henrietta said. “We’ll sit by the fire and lift a glass to Caroline.”
“Has she been back here often?” Kate asked.
“Oddly not; the Rayleys visited with her once, but they wouldn’t take their eyes off her. I think they feared she would wander off just as she had come, holding out her hands to someone else. It took them years to believe that Caroline was there to stay. They used to go into her room at night to be sure she hadn’t vanished into thin air. Eventually Caroline became a real little girl who could be trusted out on her own. Fortunately, she was small when they got her, so she had time to grow into independence and they had time to accept it. The Rayleys are very sound people, which was a great relief.”
“You knew that when you called them that day?”
“I knew them well, of course. But all I thought of that day was their longing for a child, and the child’s need of a home. I felt, even though I’d just met Caroline, an urgency that she find the right home, not just be adopted by people I’d never heard of, however worthy.”
Kate started to ask another question, but restrained herself. The time for questions had passed; the time for answers might come, but only Henrietta could decide that. They sat with their drinks in front of the fire and let the evening darken altogether before they turned on the lights and thought about dinner.
“I’ve a thick soup I made last night; it improves with age, like the best women. Will that do? There’s also homemade bread and decent wine.”
“It sounds like the beginning of another fantasy,” Kate said. “I don’t get to the country much, and rarely am offered homemade soup and bread. Mostly I subsist on nouvelle cuisine and fish, neither of which I especially like. When we’re home we eat omelettes or Chinese food, delivered by an intense young person on a bicycle. This is a lovely change. Can we eat in front of the fire, looking like a scene from a made-for-television movie?”
“We are, I fear, insufficiently rustic.”
But nothing else was insufficient. One of those times, Kate thought, when it is all just right, and you never quite understand why, except that it was unplanned and in the highest degree unlikely ever to happen just that way again.
Dinner over, they sat sipping their coffee by the fire, which was dying because Henrietta hesitated to throw on another log: it would commit them to a delayed bedtime. Kate was beyond the most minor decisio
n. It had been a long day, but she was in that odd state of fatigue past weariness. She simply sat. And Henrietta, having, it seemed, decided, threw a large log on the fire.
“I’d better tell you,” she said, sitting forward and staring at the fire. “Someone, I suppose, should know. But if I tell you, it will end our friendship. I’ll trust you, but I won’t want to know you anymore. Which is a pity; the world is not that full of intelligent friends.”
Kate couldn’t argue with the truth of that. “But if I say don’t tell me, shall we go on being friends? Is it my decision?”
“Probably not,” Henrietta said, sighing. “In telling you there was anything to tell, I’ve already crossed that bridge; I’ve already burned it.”
“It’s ironic,” Kate said. “Like so much else. I guessed, of course–not what you would tell, but that there was something to tell. Once you knew that, we were destined to have only this one night by the fire.”
“Truncated friendships are my fate,” Henrietta said. “As you shall learn. There never is any turning back.” Henrietta paused only a moment.
“It began with a young woman very like Caroline now, a graduate student. We became friends, as you have with Caroline. But it was, or seemed, a more perilous friendship then. Women didn’t become close to one another; their eyes were always on the men. I was an associate professor, rather long in the tooth for that, but women didn’t get promoted very rapidly in those days. We talked, this graduate student and I, about, oh, everything I seemed never to have talked about. Such talk became more ordinary later, with CR groups and all the rest; it’s hard now to recall the loneliness of professional women in those years, the constant tension and anxiety of doing the wrong thing, of offending.
“You have to understand what a conservative woman I was then. If I felt any criticism of the academic world I had fought my way into, I never let it rise to consciousness, let alone expressed it. I just wanted to be accepted, to teach, to write; I liked to tell myself it was simple. And my life was very full. There were the twins; there was my marriage, good then, better now, fine always–we’ve worked on it, examined our assumptions. But to understand this story you have to imagine yourself back then, back before Betty Friedan described ‘the problem that has no name.’