Beloved Stranger

by Joan Wolf

  She stared back, her own eyes clearly reflecting her confusion and her hurt. She couldn’t answer him. Quite suddenly he smiled and his whole face was transformed. “Listen, querida,” and now his voice was gentle, “I know this has been a very hard time for you. I am as much responsible as you and yet you have had to bear all the worry, all the pain. Let me take care of you now. I know you will be a good mother and, who knows, you may even come to like being a wife.” His eyes sparkled. “I am not so bad, you know. Now what do you say? Do you want to keep this baby?”

  Of course she wanted to keep her baby, more than anything else in the world. But what would the final price be? “Yes,” she said. Her widely spaced gray eyes searched his worriedly. “What—what kind of marriage did you have in mind?”

  He looked surprised. “Marriage is marriage,” he said. “I didn’t know there were different brands.”

  She could feel herself flushing. “I meant—did you expect it would be permanent?”

  “Permanent?” he echoed. And then his eyes narrowed as comprehension struck him. “Do you mean would I expect to divorce you after the baby is born?”

  “Well,” said Susan. “Yes.”

  His mouth thinned. “No,” he said flatly. “I would expect you to be my wife.” He looked at her assessingly and she was terribly conscious of her bulky figure. “What are you afraid of?”

  She closed her eyes for a minute. “Everything.” Her voice was barely audible.

  When she opened her eyes again his face had softened. “You are afraid to trust your future to me,” he said very gently. “Don’t worry, little one. I will take good care of you.” He reached out and touched her cheek lightly. “We will have a son—the son we made together.” He picked up her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “You did not find me so disagreeable once. It will be like that again.”

  The touch of his fingers, his mouth, brought back disturbing memories. “We really don’t know each other. Do—do you still think we could make it work?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Of course. Why ever should we not?”

  Why ever? Susan thought blankly. And, really, what was her alternative? She looked up into his dark eyes. “Well—all right,” she said.

  He smiled at her and she felt the corners of her mouth lifting in response. “Good girl,” he said. “We will do very well together. And now, why don’t we go along to your shelter home and collect your things? You might as well come back to Stamford with me now.” He signaled the waitress for her check.

  Susan was a little nonplussed. She had been making her own decisions for so long now, it was a little bewildering to have someone move in so efficiently. It was also, she thought a little wryly as he paid her bill and pulled out her chair, rather pleasant. She wouldn’t at all mind being bossed about for a while. She was very weary of managing on her own. Nevertheless, she said firmly, as they stepped out into the heat of the city street, “I have to go talk to the people in the agency first. They’ve been very good to me.”

  “Do you want to go now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well,” he said, and, putting a hand on her back, guided her toward a forest-green Mercedes. “I’ll come with you. I don’t want anyone trying to change your mind.”

  God, Susan thought, what were they going to think at the agency when she turned up with Rick Montoya? It really would be easier if he stayed in the car. She glanced sideways at the set of his mouth and decided not to argue. She didn’t have the energy. “What is the address?” he asked, and she gave it to him.

  Chapter Three

  The following week was one of the most stressful and unsettling times in Susan’s entire life. It started with the ride to Stamford in Ricardo’s car. They had left Susan’s old Volkswagen behind; Ricardo assured her easily that he would have someone pick it up.

  “What are we going to tell people?” she asked him as she sat back against the comfortable beige upholstery of the Mercedes.

  He flicked a glance at her before he went back to watching the road. “What do you mean?”

  She felt horribly embarrassed. “I don’t want people to know the truth,” she said unhappily. “Couldn’t we say we’ve known each other for a while?”

  “Oh, I see.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “I don’t see why we couldn’t say that, querida. We’ll say we met in the autumn and quarreled in January. All the rest can be the truth—your keeping the news of your pregnancy secret and so forth.”

  “Yes, I suppose that would do.” She felt her cheeks grow hot. “What are people going to think of me?”

  He chuckled. “People will think very well of us. After all, we’re doing the proper thing.”

  “They will think well of you for making an honest woman of me. They won’t think so well of me, I’m afraid.”

  He shrugged. “It is not important what other people think.” He glanced at her again, his eyes warm and bright in the late sunshine. “I know what kind of woman you are, querida. That is all that matters.”

  Susan felt a sudden flash of gratitude. After all, he had never even questioned whether or not this baby was his. She wondered how many other men would have behaved so gracefully under the present circumstances. She sighed a little and he reached out to cover her small hand with his strong, warm one. “Don’t worry,” he said easily. “It will all work out.”

  * * * *

  They were married four days later in Stamford. Joe Hutchinson, the second baseman on Ricardo’s team, and Maggie Ellis, Susan’s closest friend, stood up for them. It was accomplished very quietly, with absolutely no press leaks, and the only other person present in the church was Mrs. Morgan.

  Susan had been extremely apprehensive about breaking the news to her mother, but the reality had not proved as dreadful as her imagination had predicted. Mrs. Morgan was visibly shocked by the sight of her pregnant daughter, but Ricardo had taken charge, and almost before she realized what was happening, Susan found herself sitting on the porch while her mother served them lemonade.

  “It was a foolish quarrel,” Ricardo was saying gravely. “And it was very wrong of Susan not to have contacted me when she knew she was to have a child.” He gave her a reproachful look and sipped his lemonade. “But now we are reconciled and all will be well.” He looked serenely at Susan’s mother out of large dark eyes. “May I have some more lemonade? It’s very good.”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Morgan moved to rise but Susan forestalled her.

  “I’ll get it, Mother,” she said hastily, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. When she returned, after a rather longer time than was necessary, Ricardo and her mother were talking comfortably about South America. Both Susan’s parents had been anthropologists and when she was a child they had periodically disappeared for stretches of a year at a time into the jungles of the Amazon.

  “I have never been to the Brazilian jungle,” Ricardo said as Susan settled down again into her chair. He had accepted his drink with a perfunctory smile. He’s used to being waited on, she thought, as she sat back and prepared to listen.

  The discussion was pleasant and civilized, and from the way her mother looked at him, Susan realized that Ricardo knew what he was talking about. When they left he gave Mrs. Morgan a smile that visibly moved her. Susan was beginning to suspect that he got a lot of mileage out of that beguiling grin.

  “Mother liked Ricardo,” she wrote in her journal that evening. She had been keeping it ever since she was sixteen, as a way of sifting through, assimilating and comprehending the raw material of her life. And life for Susan, daughter of two educated and brilliant super-achievers, had never been easy. She loved her parents dearly, she had admired and adored her elder sister Sara, but she was different from the rest of the family, slower, more introspective, more deeply feeling. The journal had become essential to the daily routine of her life.

  She looked now at the sentence she had written and then added, “and what is perhaps more surprising, she was impressed by him. Th
ere is an extraordinary quality about him that goes beyond his looks. He simply sat there on our porch, drinking lemonade and wearing perfectly ordinary-looking clothes, and one somehow had the impression that he was conferring an honor on us by his very presence.” She frowned a little as she thought. “It’s not that he’s conceited,” she wrote then. “He’s not. But he has—perhaps presence is the best word for it. Whatever it is, it did a job on Mother. She’s coming to the wedding and she never even objected when she learned her Protestant Yankee daughter was going to be married by a Catholic priest. I suppose the fact that said Protestant daughter is also seven months pregnant had a lot to do with her compliance.”

  Susan put down her pen and looked out the window of her bedroom. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. Ricardo was playing a night game and wouldn’t be home until after midnight. She thought now that it was odd she hadn’t thought of staying with her mother until the wedding. Her mother hadn’t suggested it either. They had both simply fallen in behind Ricardo like good soldiers, nodding yes to whatever he suggested.

  Extraordinary, she thought, and yawned. She was very tired. She looked one more time at her diary entry and then closed the book. She got into the wide bed in the big bedroom Ricardo had given to her and tried to get comfortable. He hadn’t even suggested that she share his room. The baby kicked, hard, and Susan smiled ruefully. In her present condition she was scarcely alluring, she thought. And then she fell asleep.

  The wedding went very smoothly and afterward Ricardo took everyone out to lunch in a very expensive Greenwich restaurant. Then Joe Hutchinson, Maggie and Mrs. Morgan left and the new Mr. and Mrs. Montoya returned home. However, Ricardo only stopped long enough to drop Susan and change clothes. The Yankees were playing a twilight double header that evening at six. Ricardo had to be at the stadium by five. “Don’t wait up for me,” he told her pleasantly as he dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll be late.”

  “All right.” She stood at the door as he walked toward the Mercedes he had left parked in the circular drive in front of the house. “Good luck!” she called, and he gave her a grin before he slid in behind the wheel.

  Susan closed the door and slowly walked back to the living room. Maria, the Colombian maid who did the cooking and cleaning for Ricardo, had been given the afternoon off in honor of the wedding, and Susan was alone. She stood silently in the middle of the living room and stared at the lovely marble fireplace. This was “home.” It didn’t feel like home, was nothing at all like the comfortable old clapboard house she had grown up in, but she was going to have to grow accustomed to it, she told herself firmly. She looked carefully around the large, high-ceilinged room. It was lovely, she admitted. The molding and wainscoting were beautiful, as was the shining wood floor. It just was far more elegant than what she was accustomed to. Far more rich.

  Ricardo’s home was a stately Georgian colonial, built of brick and slate and set on a wooded couple of acres in north Stamford. He had bought it two years ago, he told her when she first arrived home with him, and his mother had furnished it for him. The furniture was not the style Susan would have chosen, but she found herself liking the carved Spanish pieces very much.

  Perhaps it was a good sign: she would have something in common with the mother-in-law she had yet to meet. Ricardo’s mother had lived in Bogota since his father’s death and came north only once or twice a year to visit her son. Ricardo also had two sisters, both quite a bit older than he, and both married and living in Bogota. “When the season’s over we’ll go visit them,” he had told her casually.

  “Ricardo, the baby is due in October,” she protested.

  “We’ll go for Christmas, then, and bring him along. My mother will be thrilled. You know how women are about babies.”

  It was not a visit that Susan looked forward to. Ricardo’s mother might be thrilled to see the baby, but Susan very much doubted if she’d be thrilled to see the bride her son had so hastily wedded.

  Oh well, she thought, as she walked slowly about the downstairs rooms of her new home, no use borrowing trouble. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. She passed through the large dining room, which also boasted a marble fireplace, and into the two rooms she was most familiar with: the breakfast room, where they ate their meals, and the family room with its lovely french doors leading out to the slate patio. “It’s scarcely what one would call a starter home,” she said out loud with a laugh of real amusement.

  There was only one room on the first floor that she hadn’t been in and that was the study. She walked in now and looked around slowly. The room was paneled and lined with bookshelves. Susan went over to one wall and looked at the titles; they were almost exclusively nonfiction. There were a number of books, both in Spanish and English, about Latin American politics. There were quite a lot of books on sports; not just baseball but soccer, tennis, golf and skiing. There was an Encyclopedia Americana and a full set of Sherlock Holmes. There was a small assortment of best-selling thriller-type novels. My God, thought Susan. There is so much I don’t know about him. She collapsed heavily into a comfortable leather armchair and stared at a photograph of Ricardo that was hanging on the wall. It looked as if it were a newspaper photo that had been blown up and framed. It showed what was clearly a moment of victory; the three men in the picture were all laughing and one of them was pouring a bottle of champagne over Ricardo’s head. His face, dark, vibrant, filled with triumph, was the dominant point of the photograph. Susan looked at that thoroughly male picture and inwardly she quaked.

  How on earth were they going to build a marriage, she thought almost despairingly. If she had searched the earth over, it would have been impossible for her to find a person so utterly opposite to her. She was quiet and introspective, reserved and shy. That night in the blizzard had been completely out of character for her.

  She thought of that night now and wondered with deep bewilderment how she had ever come to behave as she had. Over the last months it had become only a hazy memory, a dizzy recollection of warmth and smoke and the deep timbre of a man’s voice. Her body heavy now with child, her senses dulled by advanced pregnancy, she couldn’t begin to understand what had possessed her.

  It was because of that night, however, that she was here, in the home of Ricardo Montoya, a man whose way of thinking and looking and relating to things was completely opposed to hers. It was frightening.

  She left the library and went upstairs. There were five bedrooms on the second floor, each with its own bathroom. Susan had been using the one next to Ricardo’s and now she hesitated and went into the empty room that belonged to her husband. She had peeked into it swiftly during the tour of the house he took her on when first she arrived, but now she looked around more carefully.

  It was a thoroughly masculine room, with large oak furniture and colorful woven material on the bed and at the windows. An oil painting hung on the wall facing the bed, a picture of a house nestled among high, green mountains and very blue sky.

  There was a clutter of loose change and papers on the dresser, and on the floor, in front of the closet, lay the suit that Ricardo had just taken off. His socks and shoes were on the floor in front of the big upholstered chair. Susan, who was innately tidy, bent awkwardly to pick up the clothes. They were all creased from lying in a heap. He might have hung them up, she thought irritably. Now they would have to be sent out to the cleaners. She folded the clothes neatly and laid them on the bed. There was a book on the night table and she went to look at it. Report on El Salvador, she read. She picked it up, read the cover and then replaced it on the table. She looked one more time around the large, sunny room and then went next door to her own bedroom.

  There was a large mirror hanging over the dresser in this room and Susan walked over to look in it.

  “Some bride,” she said ironically as she regarded her own reflection.

  She actually looked very nice. Her skin had tanned to a pale honey from sitting out in Elaine’s small yard and her shimmer
ing light brown hair framed a face that had filled out a little with imminent motherhood. She looked, Susan thought, disgustingly healthy. But not even the expensive pale pink suit her mother had bought her could disguise her advanced pregnancy.

  Susan kicked off her shoes and sighed with relief to stand barefoot again. She felt so small in comparison to Ricardo that she had bought much higher heels than she was accustomed to wearing. She took off her suit and hung it carefully in the closet. Then, wearing only her slip, she went over to the bed and lay down. There was a lovely breeze coming in the open window and she suddenly felt very tired. In two minutes, Susan was asleep.

  When she awoke it was dark and she was feeling hungry. She showered, put on a smocked sun dress and thongs and went downstairs to the kitchen. She made herself a sandwich and then went into the family room and switched on the television. She looked at her watch. It was almost nine o’clock. The second game of the doubleheader should still be on.

  It was the first time Susan had ever watched Ricardo play. Baseball had not been a sport anyone in her family ever watched and she was entirely unfamiliar with the routine of major league ball. She knew the basic rules of the game, had learned them almost by osmosis as does every American child, but the names and the tactics and the teams and the rivalries—all of these had remained obscure. She had refrained scrupulously from watching Ricardo before now; it had been almost a superstition that she should not allow him to come even that close to her. But now she sat back, munched her sandwich and prepared to watch.

  It took her awhile to sort out what was happening. It took her awhile as well to sort out the strange feeling she had whenever Ricardo appeared on the screen, swinging a bat, looking relaxed and confident and surprisingly graceful.

  “Montoya’s the key to the pennant,” the announcer was saying. “As long as he stays healthy, the Yankees are practically unbeatable.”