Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  I was stung. “What is it you have against her?”

  “Geoff O’Connor broke Ceel’s heart.”

  “I was asking about Daintry O’Connor.”

  Mother zipped the side compartment of her bag. “Did I tell you about Paul Sullivan?”

  “Yes.” No doubt the earlier reference to my father had reminded her. Paul Sullivan, a jut-jawed pillar of St. Francis—usher, lay reader, senior warden, Every Member Canvas head—had dropped dead a month earlier while swinging a nine iron, killed without symptom by his own heart at fifty-four. A death too similar to the “no warning” circumstances of Daddy’s.

  Sometimes Ceel and I talked of dying, macabre conversations in which we speculated whose genes we’d inherited. Whose thin hair or blue eyes, bowlegs or small shoulders—and whose death sentence. Would we be genetically blessed with our mother’s good health and longevity? Or doomed to our father’s fate, felled by a stroke at fifty-five? “Don’t you dare die first and leave me to gum chicken salad alone,” she’d warned me with utter seriousness. And with each conversation, the limit of age with which we agreed to be content—satisfied with having lived long enough—expanded.

  “Sixty. If I can live to sixty it’s okay,” we blithely swore. And then, “Sixty-five, just to sixty-five.” And later, greedily, seventy, we openly begged each other, and privately, God.

  Surrounded by Ellen’s juvenile possessions, Mother’s face looked etched with age. Memories leave their markings. “Paul was such a good Episcopalian,” she said.

  “You and your ‘good Episcopalians,‘” I teased her. “You’re such an Episcopal snob. A murderer could be forgiven as long as he was Episcopalian.”

  “Murderers can be forgiven.”

  I plucked at a loose thread on Ellen’s quilted bedspread, unsure whether to trust my voice. “What did you think of our minister?”

  “He seemed nice enough. No point in getting attached to an interim rector, though.”

  The thread stretched, snapped in my fingers. Mother fetched her shower cap from the hook on the door. “What about that Doesy Howard? She seems nice.”

  “Oh, Mother.”

  “Oh, Mother, what?”

  “There’s no . . . basis there. We have no common ground.”

  “What kind of common ground do you need?”

  What indeed. “Did you see the Thursday paper featuring Daintry front and center in the business section?” I said instead. I hadn’t shown the article to anyone over breakfast that morning. It hurt to mention it now, but I was powerless not to, the way a tongue seeks a raw ulcer despite the pain. “Holiday filler,” I joked feebly.

  “I never read the business section,” Mother said, dispatching the topic. Though not entirely. “Doesn’t surprise me a bit. She could do anything she put her mind to.” The tone was neutral, not complimentary. “Mark seems like an awfully unfocused child.”

  I bridled, though I had no intention of sharing my concerns about Mark’s recent misbehavior. They were trifling infractions, likely, typical teenage stunts. My private New Year’s resolution was to distract him from Wendy Howard. Wean him away, a baby from a bottle, though it was hardly an apt analogy. “He’s probably not even a virgin anymore,” Daintry had said. “Mark’s almost sixteen, Mother. He’s supposed to be unfocused. Comes with the chromosome.”

  “Does he have a sport?”

  “Having a sport” was a trait Mother had long espoused, as though an aptitude for golf or tennis or baseball could simply be decided upon and claimed for life. I thought of the single Cullen tennis court paved with highway asphalt, whose cracked and buckled surface sent balls careening crazily and defeated any hope of actual play. “Best place for smoking on the sly,” Daintry had informed me one humid summer evening as we list-lessly lobbed balls over the swaybacked net.

  “Remember that summer of back-to-back tennis camps you insisted I go to?” I reminded Mother. “It totally backfired. I hate tennis. I hate competing.”

  She fastened earrings to her lobes, wincing as spring snapped onto flesh. Her expression was thoughtful. “Did I ever tell you. . . ”

  “What?”

  “You were about twelve. I was picking up Sunday school materials at St. Francis and you stayed in the car sulking about something. I mentioned—or complained—to Father Edwards how you refused to try out for the junior high basketball team, or cheerleading.” She snapped her fingers, retreated to the bathroom again, and reemerged with a toothbrush. “Almost forgot this.”

  Though she moved with her usual brisk efficiency, I sensed a stall. “So what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Jean, leave Hannah alone and let her read. That’s what she likes to do. It’s what she’s good at.‘”

  A warm rush of appreciation and gratitude for Father Edwards, the dreamy, portly minister of my confirmation and wedding ceremonies, filled me.

  “Well. Trying to get you interested in sports was a losing battle at that point. Daintry O’Connor had you under a spell.”

  I laughed. “ ’Spell’?”

  “She was like the Pied Piper. You were fixated on that girl.”

  The vehemence surprised me. “I thought we were fixated on each other.”

  “Are you serious? She never needed a soul!”

  “Maybe Daintry didn’t need me, Mother. Maybe she just liked me.” I didn’t like the turn in the conversation. “She didn’t have a sport.”

  Mother slid one slipper toe into the other and tucked them in her bag. “She should have. She was certainly competitive enough.”

  I rose. “How about a turkey sandwich for the road?”

  Mother knelt and looked under the bed. “I want you to do something for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Persuade Ceel to drop these adoption attempts.”

  The day before Mother’s arrival, Ceel had come over bearing a bulky album. “I brought something for you to see,” she said with uncustomary shyness. “Our portfolio. Minus the five-page autobiography that I’ll spare you from reading, and spare me the embarrassment.”

  I flipped slowly through pages stiff with glue and photographs, some of which I myself had taken of Ceel and Ben. Pictures of their house; of Ceel in the kitchen, holding baskets of flowers; of Ben at school, directing carpool with his megaphone; of the two of them hiking together along a wooded trail, bundled in scarves on a sled, their smiles white as the snowy scene that surrounded them. Wonderful pictures, captioned in Ceel’s handwriting with exclamation points of enthusiasm. Wonderful pictures, and heartbreaking.

  “Here’s the killer,” Ceel said, and pointed to the final snapshot. Sporting helmets, knee and elbow pads, she and Ben were Rollerblading through the Academy parking lot. “That’s a grimace, not a smile.”

  “Since when have you taken up Rollerblading?”

  “Since the agency powers-that-be suggested we include activities in the portfolio that appeal to teenagers. That’s who the mothers are—teenagers, and they’re the ones who pick the parents.”

  “As if a sixteen-year-old could make that decision. That teenager could be Mark!”

  Ceel nodded. “Except that Mark probably would have nothing to do with it. If the daddies were involved, the teenage mothers wouldn’t be giving up their babies in the first place, right? Or even be pregnant.” She closed the book. “The agency gives each mother three or four portfolios—the next-in-lines, and they decide on that basis.” Though she shrugged, her accompanying smile held a measure of admitted defeat, of yielding to the necessary. “I’ll do anything they tell me to do. Anything. You do what you have to do.”

  “Is that related to ‘People do what they want to do’?” I was quoting one of Mother’s oft-repeated maxims. Yet it was never intended as a nugget of wisdom, but as a comment on behavior instead. People did what they wanted to do, not what they ought.

  “I’m mailing it tomorrow,” Ceel had said. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  Somewhere in a cubicle or hospital bed, Ceel’s pains
takingly created album was being perused and debated. “Adoption is different these days,” I said to Mother now, knowing she could cite a roster of adopted children who had grown into adults with addictions and instability problems. “The people in charge know much more about the children they find homes for. Look at the O’Connor children. They were adopted and look how they turned out. Every single one, extraordinary.”

  “Since Jack O’Connor handpicked them I’d call it something other than adopting. Cream of the crop.”

  “Oh, Mother, what can you do, compare Apgar scores?”

  “What’s that?” she asked. I shook my head. A pointless conversation. “I’m just trying to do the best for my child.”

  “Mother. Jack O’Connor was trying to do the best for the children he found homes for, too.”

  “Do you see much of her?”

  “Who?”

  “Daintry,” she responded impatiently.

  “I’ve tried, but. . . I don’t know. She’s aloof. Maybe it’s me, expecting too much.”

  “You’ve never had any trouble making friends.”

  “Mother, this isn’t a fifth-grade problem. It’s a genuine. . . impasse. There’s an unresolved feeling to every conversation between us.”

  “Impasse? Don’t be dramatic.”

  “We’re . . . different people with different interests now, like you and, well, Daintry’s mother.”

  “I never let Kathleen O’Connor make me feel inadequate in any way,” Mother said curtly, correction and negation both. She looked up quickly, then away to the window again, the fir-studded slopes. “Hannah,” she began, “there’s something I ought to tell you.” My stomach knit.

  “Daintry. . . ,” she began, faltered. “You and Daintry were. . . ”

  “Best friends.”

  Back to me, she straightened her shoulders. “Before sixth grade began I went to the principal and requested you and Daintry be put with different teachers. I wanted to separate you.”

  I laughed, relieved. “That’s just the kind of demand that drives the administration wild at Asheville Academy. Intervening mothers.”

  “Mothers have to be advocates for their children.”

  I rolled my eyes at the trendy terminology. “Also known as favoritism.”

  Mother sat on a tufted stool and took my hand. “Daintry made you nervous the other night when she stopped by, didn’t she? Don’t be so thin-skinned around her.”

  “I thought she was making you nervous.”

  “Daintry and I. . . There’s something between Daintry and me.”

  “Join the club.”

  Her head jerked up. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I. . . I thought she might have told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  She stroked her neck, looked in the mirror, smoothed an eyebrow with her baby finger. “You’ll do most anything for the welfare of a child.”

  “So you said.” I waited.

  “Just before you both went to Carolina,” she said slowly, then gathered speed, “you were visiting that school friend in Shreveport. Your luggage got lost, I remember.” Her throat moved faintly with swallowing. “Daintry and I had lunch together at Jack Horner’s—remember Jack Horner’s?” She rose and pushed the stool back under the dressing table. “They fixed the best hot dogs in Cullen.”

  “Why did you invite Daintry to have lunch?”

  “I was writing old friends, asking them to send recs to their sorority on your behalf.”

  “Yes.” I knew about alumnae recommendations, had heard plenty read aloud during cut sessions.

  “I suggested to Daintry that she go through rush.”

  “She probably would have gone through rush anyway. Everybody did.” For we’d done that together, too, exhausting evening parties of chatter and punch and doyou-know. Comparing houses and judging sisters afterward, even as those houses and sisters were comparing and judging us. Exclusion, I came to discover, depended on frighteningly trivial details. Find me a creature in nature crueler than a human female.

  “Description?” the rush counselor asked, opening a cut session.

  “She had on those big, red-rimmed glasses,” someone volunteered without looking up from the needlepoint cummerbund she was stitching for a boyfriend.

  “Positive comment?”

  Silence. Slight, damning giggle.

  “Negative comment?”

  Audible sigh. “This is the third round and she didn’t remember my name. Cut.”

  “No. . . No. She wouldn’t have,” Mother went on. “Daintry couldn’t afford to join a sorority. Tuition, textbooks, living expenses, all that was more than Jack O’Connor could financially handle. Small-town pediatrician, sole practitioner, and most of that gratis. He’d already put two children through college, and still had two to go.”

  “But she pledged with me.” For we’d made it, Daintry and I, granted admittance to those cloistered confines of belonging. After an intense and endless night of discussion, my fear of rejection was unfounded. We were both issued identical bids and joined the same sorority.

  “Yes. I was the one who paid Daintry’s dues and fees that first year and. . . ”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d asked her to, well, take you under her wing. Look after you. Go through rush with you.”

  My face went slack.

  “You know how Daintry was,” she continued. “Charismatic and popular. A natural leader.”

  I didn’t hear what Daintry was. I already knew what Daintry was. What I heard was how my mother had guaranteed my social security. “Let me see if I get this straight.” I watched my clenched fingers whiten at the knuckles. “You paid, she pledged, and I held on to her coattails. You cut a deal with Daintry O’Connor. Does that about sum it up?”

  “That’s a negative way of looking at it.”

  “ ’Look after me’?” Disbelief made my voice shrill. On a journey to nowhere I strode across the room and back.

  “Just for that one year.” My mother’s voice asked for understanding, but I heard nothing but her addendum. “You were in thrall to that child.”

  “Who cares? I was happy.”

  Mother’s face was stricken. “It was subservience! You were her slave! One of the reasons we sent you to boarding school was to get you out of Daintry O’Connor’s clutches.”

  “And then you purchased her clutches again.”

  She set her jaw. “Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”

  I ceased pacing abruptly, fighting for control and for comprehension of my mother’s calculations. “What were you thinking? Was Daddy part of it?”

  “No. I used money of my own. I told you what I was thinking. You have to be an advocate for your child.”

  “You call that stunt advocacy?”

  “I can appreciate how knowing this might be an awkward position for you, but—”

  “Awkward?”

  “Stop repeating what I say. You still let her get to you.”

  “Don’t. Do not talk to me.”

  “There are things you do for people that seem right at the time. For people you love. Something that presents itself as a perfect solution. And I’m not sorry. I’m not.”

  “I want you to go now.”

  “Hannah—”

  “I need to get all this Christmas crap out of the house,” I said, certain I would strike her if she dared utter a word about my language.

  She stood. “It’s water over the dam. Past history.” Not when the past was so vibrantly affecting the present. Don’t you know anything? I could have said to my mother, just as Daintry had said to me.

  Needles pricked my arms and dug under my nails as I pulled light strands from the tree. Daintry O’Connor agreed to be a protective watchdog in a bargain between daughter’s mother and daughter’s friend. My fingers shook with both anger and shame.

  As roommates that freshman fall something was restored between us. Together we’d shopped for bedspreads and hot
plates, navigated the perilous waters of drop-add, ate wormy ramen, endured a suitemate who played Bette Midler day and night. Had it all been only a purchased facade?

  I coiled the cord tightly, yard upon yard of light bulbs dulled with daylight and streaked with silver tinsel, then moved around the room swiftly and methodically clearing decorations—wire reindeer, angel candlesticks, porcelain Santa basket empty of peppermints. From the mantel I unhooked stockings, homely St. Francis bazaar offerings from decades earlier, all glued rickrack and irregularly sewn appliqués. The O’Connor stockings, products of their mother’s time and talent, were beautifully needleworked with elves and Santas and angels sprouting downy wisps of angora yarn as hair and beards, gilt thread trimming wings and slippers, jet beads for eyes.

  Without a glance at gay greetings grown stale, I emptied a basket of cards. “Look at this,” Mother had said one Christmas, holding out the O’Connor card. “She put apostrophe s on their name.”

  “Look at this,” Daintry had said to me in South Building. We’d gone to check our class files, count required courses. She’d pointed. “My projected QP is 3.2. Yours is 2.3.”

  From the fireside tin bucket I plucked Christmas matches from splinters of fatwood: Daintry’s gift. Searing, unexpected grief buckled me to the hearth. Grief for what once was: an uncomplicated friendship.

  After that single semester as initiated sorority sisters, Daintry simply exited. She went inactive and moved into an apartment alone. It was said she’d taken a job in the alumni office. Now and then her name would appear in the campus newspaper or on a poster tacked to the Student Union bulletin board, connected to some campus activity or movement, running for Student Council office, an organizer of some panel discussion. I’d glimpse her strolling Franklin Street on a balmy Saturday, hurrying across the Pit toward the Student Store, even on one frigid March night among hundreds of spectators massed outside Greenlaw Hall during the streaking craze. As she’d done at Cullen High, Daintry pursued what she wanted with remarkable single-mindedness, making a life for herself and moving beyond me, out of reach. Until that afternoon in the graduate library, when she’d found me and taunted me with lines from my own book of quotes.