Arkwright (10 page)

Maggie went to the door, but before she could open it, Hank stepped in front of her. “She's awake,” he said to her and Nat, “and Sylvia's in there with her, but”—he hesitated—“the nurse came out and said that her mother wanted to speak to her in private and asked us to wait out here.”

Maggie stared at the door and then turned her gaze toward Nat. The color had left his face. His mouth was open, but nothing was coming out. Nat looked back at her; no words were necessary, for in that instant, they both knew what Judith was telling Sylvia.

Maggie felt her legs become weak. She instinctively grabbed Nat's elbow for support. All of a sudden, this was the last place in the world she wanted to be.

The only thing they could do was wait.

The three of them stood together in the hallway, ignoring the hospital staff walking around them, the occasional cryptic announcement coming over the PA system, for what was probably only a few minutes but seemed much longer. Then the door opened, and Sylvia came out.

She stood for a moment in the doorway, her face just as pale as her father's. No one spoke for several seconds, and then Nat stepped forward.

“Sylvia, I … I'm so sorry, I—”

Her hand shot up. She slapped him across the face. “That's for never telling me,” she said, her voice an angry croak, and then she turned to Maggie.

Maggie braced herself, but while Sylvia's hand trembled, it remained at her side. Instead, she looked at Maggie, her mouth opening, closing, and then opening again. Maggie waited for her to speak, and at last the words came.

“That woman in there is my mother,” Sylvia said. “It'll never be you.”

 

12

Kate stared at the woman seated across the table. “That can't be true.”

“It's true.” Maggie's expression couldn't have been more serious. “I can show you the birth certificate. I'll even consent to a DNA test, if you insist.” She paused. “Or you can call your mother. Sylvia will confirm everything I've told you now that she knows that you know.”

Kate looked down at the table. Sometime in the last few minutes, the waiter had delivered their food. The lobster salad was utterly revolting. The room felt too warm, and the other restaurant guests sounded as if they were shouting at one another. Bile, acidic and bitter, rose from her stomach into her throat; realizing that she was about to be sick, she shoved back her chair, stumbled to her feet, and hurried out of the restaurant.

As luck would have it, the ladies' room was vacant. Kate slammed open the door of the nearest stall and, bracing her hands against the wall, leaned over the commode and opened her mouth. But nothing came out. She gasped for air and willed herself to throw up, but either there was nothing in her stomach or the panic attack was beginning to subside.

After a couple of minutes, her breathing returned to normal, and her heart no longer pounded. Kate went to the sink, where she rinsed her face and tried to comb her hair as best as she could with her fingers. Then she straightened her blouse and skirt, took a deep breath, and went back to the restaurant.

Margaret Krough was still seated at their table. “Are you okay?” she asked when Kate returned. There was a look of concern on her face that could only be described as grandmotherly. “I thought about coming to see if you were all right, but, well, I figured you might want to be alone.”

Kate nodded as she sat down. The lobster salad was still there, but she'd lost her appetite; she covered the plate with her napkin. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—”

“No.” Maggie shook her head. “I should be the one to apologize. I hit you hard with something you weren't expecting. There was no other way to tell you, but I can't blame you for being upset.”

Kate gazed at her, trying to see her in a different way yet having trouble doing so. She'd never known her grandmother—or rather the woman she'd grown up believing to be her grandmother—but nonetheless, it was difficult to accept the new truth with which she'd been confronted: her grandmother was alive, and sitting across the table from her.

“So what am I supposed to call you?” she asked. “Grandma?”

“If you'd like, but I think we're past that now. Maggie is fine.” A sad smile. “To tell the truth, though, there were times when I wished you knew me and could call me that name. But that's the choice I made, and I had to live with it.”

“Why did you do it?”

Maggie let out her breath as a quiet sigh. “Please understand, when I discovered that I was pregnant from my affair with Nathan, I was in my early twenties and working as an assistant editor at Street & Smith. I had my eye on a publishing career, perhaps even starting my own literary agency. Even while I was having a relationship with your grandfather, I was coming to realize that getting married and having a child was the last thing I wanted to do, and in fact, I never did. But having an abortion was…” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “Well, it wasn't a pleasant prospect. They were far more dangerous back then than they are today. So I was between a rock and a hard place.”

She absently ran a fingertip around the rim of her water glass. “Fortunately, Nat took responsibility for what had happened. We'd just broken up when the doctor told me the news. It really was just a fling, although for a little while, I'd thought it was serious enough that I made the mistake of writing a letter to Harry, but Nat accepted the fact that the child was his, and it was up to him to do something about it. He and Judith had met by then, and their relationship was serious enough that engagement was inevitable, but she'd already accepted me as an old girlfriend who was still one of her beau's best friends.”

“That was rather forgiving of her,” Kate said.

“Judie was a saint. I was at the party where she and Nat met, and … look, it's a long story, but what it boils down to is that I was trying to figure out how to break up with him without hurting him too badly when they met. Nat liked me well enough, but with her, it was love at first sight. All I had to do was step aside and let nature take its course.”

“So the three of you stayed friends.”

“That's right. And that made it easy for the three of us to sit down and work things out.”

“So my grandparents—Grandpapa and Judith, I mean—”

Maggie smiled. “If you still want to call Judie your grandmother, you can. I understand.”

“So they decided to adopt my mother once she was born.”

“That's correct.” Resting her elbows on the table, Maggie clasped her hands together. “I took a leave of absence from Street & Smith—I hadn't yet begun to show, so they accepted my story that I was having a ‘case of nerves' and needed a sabbatical—and moved up to New Hampshire, where my family had a summer cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. My parents were sympathetic to my situation, and my mother came up to take care of me. In the meantime, Nat and Judie tied the knot and then moved up to Boston where Nat had a teaching position waiting for him at Boston College. Judie bought some maternity clothes and started wearing pillows beneath them, and because she wouldn't let anyone touch her belly and stayed home as often as she could, everyone accepted their story that she was pregnant. When the time came, they took a weekend trip up to New Hampshire, where she allegedly gave birth to her child.”

“In a vacation cabin on the lake, with a country midwife who happened to live nearby doing the delivery.” Kate slowly nodded. “That's what I was told, growing up. And it was all a lie.”

Maggie shrugged. “I prefer to think of it as a plausible fabrication.”

“And no one else knew?”

“The only two other people who knew were Harry and George, and they promised to keep it to themselves.” She raised a hand before Kate could ask the obvious question. “Because they belong to the Legion of Tomorrow, and we've never kept secrets from each other … well, almost never.”

“So Grandpapa adopted Mama, and Grandma raised her as her own child. And you—”

“Maintained a discreet distance.” Maggie gazed out the window. “It was actually a fairly pleasant arrangement. Once I became an agent and took on Nat as my first client, I was able to watch Sylvia grow up. She always thought of me as the lady who took care of her father's business, and I was even her babysitter a couple of times.” Her face darkened. “But Nat never really warmed to her. Because of the circumstances in which she was born, I think he had trouble accepting her as his legitimate child, and after he quit teaching to become a full-time writer, he paid more attention to his work than he did to her. That hurt their relationship even more. And when Judie told her the truth just before she passed away—”

“I think I understand everything now.”

“No, you don't.” Maggie shook her head. “Only part of it, the part where you know why Nat, Harry, and I share a bond that goes back many years and how the Legion of Tomorrow has become the basis for the Arkwright Foundation.”

“
How,
sure, but not why.” Despite everything Maggie had just told her, Kate found herself thinking like a reporter again. Of the “five Ws” that had been drilled into her back in journalism school—
who, what, when, where,
and
why
—she'd learned the first four; the all-important fifth one was still missing.

“You're right. You should know this too.” The waiter came by, and Maggie motioned for him to take away the plates. “I guess it really started just a few blocks up the street, during the 1989 World Science Fiction Convention.” She paused, and a bleak smile crossed her face. “Come to think of it, that was almost exactly fifty years after Nat, Harry, George, and I first met.”

 

13

It should have been a good weekend for Nat. In the end, though, Maggie realized that bringing him there had been a mistake.

The line for his autograph session began forming an hour before he actually showed up. By the time Maggie escorted him up the escalator to the promenade of the Hynes Convention Center where author signings were taking place, nearly four hundred people were waiting for him. Nathan Arkwright stared at the line snaking down the broad upstairs mezzanine, and for a moment, Maggie thought he was going to turn and beat a hasty retreat to the curb where his housekeeper, Mr. Sterling, had dropped them off just a few moments earlier.

“My god, Maggie,” he muttered. “Who are all these people here for?”

“You, my love,” she whispered, and then she took him by the arm and led him to the table.

This was the first science fiction convention Nathan had attended in years. Indeed, if it hadn't been in his own state, he probably wouldn't have shown up at all. But the mass-market paperback of
Through the Event Horizon
had just come out, and since the book was a
New York Times
hardcover bestseller last year, his publisher was putting a major push behind it, and they wanted Nat to make at least a couple of public appearances to promote the book. Showing up for one day of this year's Worldcon shouldn't have been much of a burden, but even so, Maggie had had to practically drag Nat out of his house. He'd become a recluse since Judith's death, and invitations to attend SF conventions had been routinely ignored.

Once Nat sat down at the table—by himself, thankfully, with no authors he didn't know sitting beside him—things got better. One by one, fans stepped before him, each bearing copies of his books to be signed, mainly
Beyond the Event Horizon
, but some also brought old and valuable editions of his earlier books, including one collector with a mint-condition copy of the May 1940 issue of
Startling
where he'd made his debut. Nat was standoffish at first, saying little if anything to the people who approached him, but he gradually warmed up to the task. He began talking to the fans, chatting with them as he signed his name with the onyx Montblanc fountain pen that Maggie had given him when he'd signed his first million-dollar contract, even talking a little bit about the Galaxy Patrol books although this was a subject he was usually reluctant to discuss with anyone who wasn't professionally involved with their production.

As she quietly sat beside him, Maggie saw a glimmer of the Nat she used to know. Deep down inside the lonely old man still mourning the death of his wife was the young writer she'd met at the first Worldcon a half century earlier. It was a pleasure to see him return, if only for a few minutes.

The signing went well, and when it was done, she escorted him up another level to the greenroom so he could get out of the public eye for a little while before his next program event. But even there he was the center of attention. Once they heard that he was in the building, longtime friends who hadn't seen him in many years—Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Kelly Freas—made a point of coming by, while younger writers for whom he was only a legend either shyly came up to shake his hand or stood off to the side, pretending to play it cool but actually delighted to be in the company of one of the Big Four. Nat sat on a couch, sipping a Diet Coke as writers, artists, and editors gathered around him, and for a little while, it seemed to Maggie that the Nat she knew and loved was coming back.

It didn't last. A couple of hours later, Nat made the second of three appearances the convention had scheduled for him that day, a panel discussion with the vague title “The Future of the Future.” Again, Nat was among friends: Bob Silverberg and Fred Pohl, along with the moderator, Stanley Schmidt, the
Analog
editor for whom Nat had written a rare Galaxy Patrol short story a couple of years earlier. The panel was held in the main ballroom, and it was filled to capacity; every seat was taken, and fans stood along the walls and sat in the aisle. So things should have gone well.

Yet they didn't. Once again, Nat was the center of attention, but what had been a novelty earlier in the day was now an unwanted task. From the first row, Maggie watched as Nat seemed to fade before her very eyes. As the hour went by, he slumped lower and lower in his chair, and he seemed incapable of engaging the other panelists in conversation but instead spoke past them, veering off topic to talk about things that had little to do with the subject at hand. When Fred spoke about emerging awareness of an electronic dominion called cyberspace, for instance, Nat responded with a rambling complaint about how hard it was to find someone in the Berkshires to repair his daisy wheel printer when it broke down. But it wasn't until the hour was nearly over that matters went from bad to worse.