Bitter Sweet (57 page)

Katy chopped a hand to her forehead, standing her bangs on end. ‘Oh, good God, Mother, how could you be so gullible? That line is as old as VD! Speaking of which -’

‘Katy, I don’t need any sermons on -’

“Speaking of which,” Katy repeated forcefully, ‘you’re supposed to use condoms, or hadn’t you heard? It’s the in thing to do if you’re going in for promiscuous sex. I mean, holy cripes, Mother, the newspapers are full of it! If you’re going to snuggle up with some Lothario who’s hitting on women all over town -’

“He is not hitting on women all over town!’ Maggie grew angry. ‘Katy, what’s got into you! You’re being purposely crude and cruel.’

‘What’s got into me!’ Katy spread a hand on her chest, her face incredulous. ‘Into me! That’s a hugh! You want to know what’s got into me when my own mother is standing in front of me five months pregnant with a married man’s kid? Well, take a good look at yourself.’ Katy railed.

‘Look at how you’ve changed since Daddy died! How do you expect me to react? You think maybe I should start passing out cigars and spreading the news that I’m going to have a new baby brother?” Katy’s face became distorted by rage as she thrust her chin forward. ‘Well, don’t hold your breath, Mother, because I’ll never think of that bastard as my brother or my sister! Never!’ She flung down the rake. ‘All I can say is I’m glad Daddy doesn’t have to be here to see this day!’

Crying, she ran for the house.

The door slammed and Maggie flinched. She stood staring at it until her tears began, Katy’s renunciation resounding through her head. A dense feeling overtook her chest: fault and apology, weighted by the burden of wrongdoing. She deserved Katy’s every rebuke. She was the mother, expected to be a paragon of irreproachability, a worthy role model. Instead, look what she’d done.

Oh, Katy, Katy, I’m sorry. You’re right on every count, but what can I do? It’s mine. I have to raise it.

Heavy-hearted, she stood in the dappled yard, quietly crying, wrestling with guilt and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, for she didn’t know, at this juncture, how to fulfill her duties as a mother. No case studies she remembered, no self-help books she’d read set precedents for a situation such as this.

The irony of it: she, a woman of forty being preached to by her daughter on the subject of birth control. Her daughter crying out, ‘What will my friends think?’

Maggie closed her eyes, waiting for the oppression to lift, but it grew heavier until she felt as if it might drive her, like a steal spike, into the very earth. She realized she was still holding the smooth, warm rake handle. Turning listlessly toward the dock she let it slip from her hand and bounce to the grass.

She sat for a while on the wooden bench of the latticed arbour seat, the one Eric had built for her. During that time, while he’d worked on it, she’d had visions of waiting here for the Mary Deare at the end of the day. Of catching the mooting line as the engine died, and walking hip to hip with him, up to the house in the gloaming when the sky was pink and purple and the water as flat as a glass of cherry nectar.

The breeze was cooler here, out over the water. A parr of white banded plovers came flapping by, scolding, chur wee, chur-wee, landing on the rocks to forage amid the flotsam. Far out on the water a sailboat with an orange spinnaker rode the wind. Maggie had meant to buy a new sailboat immediately after settling here. There were times when she’d imagined herself and Eric taking weekend jaunts up to Chicago, taking in shows, eating at Crickets, and ambling with joined hands among the slips in Admont Harbor, admiring the craft that sailed in from points all around the Great Lakes. She’d meant to buy a sailboat, but now she wouldn’t, for what pastime was lonelier than sailing alone?

She missed Eric in those moments with so intense a grip that it seemed to be crushing the breath from her. She wanted nothing so badly as to be strong, self-reliant, wilful even, and she would be again, but in her weaker moments, as now, she needed him with a stultifying desperation.

She found this appalling.

What, after all, did one person know of another’s intentions? Analysing her and Eric’s relationship, she realized he could have been amusing himself with her all along, without the slightest notion of leaving his extraordinarily beautiful wife. The story about
Nancy
’s refusal to consider a family - was it false? After all, Eric’s wife was pregnant now, wasn’t she?

Maggie sighed, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the lattices.

What did it matter, his honesty or lack of it?

Their affair was ended. Absolutely. She had shunned him, had stalked away peremptorily in the rain, had refused his phone calls and icily asked that he not call again the once he’d shown up at her door. But her aloofness was a sham.

She missed him. She loved him, still. She wanted to believe he had not lied.

The plovers flew away. The spinnaker became a black spec in the distance. On the road above, a car rumbled past. Life moved on. So must Maggie.

She finished the raking alone, bagged the sticks and ventured to the house to find Katy gone, a note on the kitchen table.

I’ve gone to Grandma’s. No signature. No further enlightenment. Certainly no love.

Maggie’s hand, heating the message, dropped disconsolately to her thigh. Mother, she thought wearily. She tossed the note onto the table, pulled off her gardening gloves, and left them, too, before ambling around the perimeter of her kitchen like someone lost, tiding the smooth Formica edge with one hip and one hand, postponing the inevitable.

She came, eventually, to the telephone on the cupboard beside the refrigerator.

The last great hurdle.

She backtracked and washed her hands at the sink. Dried them. Studied the telephone at ten paces, as a duellist studies ‘his opponent before raising his arm. Finding no more logical delays, she closed the hall door and sat down on a small white stool next to the instrument.

Go ahead, get it over with.

At last she picked up the receiver and punched out her mother’s number, drawing a deep, full-chested breath as she heard the ring, picturing the house- flawlessly clean, as usual - and her mother with her neat, dated hairdo, hurrying toward the kitchen.

‘Hello?’ Vera answered.

‘Hallo, Mother.’

Silence: Oh, it’s ‘Is Katy there?’

‘Katy? No. Should she be?’

‘She will be soon. She’s on her way over, and she’s very upset.’

‘Over what? Did you two have another fight?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What’s it about this time?’

‘Mother, I’m sorry to tell you this way. I should have come over and told you personally instead of dropping it on you like this.’ Maggie inhaled shakily, released half the breath and said, ‘I’m expecting Eric Severson’s baby.’

Stunned silence, then, ‘Oh, merciful lord.’ The words sounded muffled, as if Vera had covered her lips with a hand.

“I just told Katy this morning and she left here in tears.’

‘Oh, merciful lord in heaven, Margaret, how could you?’

‘I know you’re very disappointed in me.’

The imperious side of Vera could not be stunned for long.

Abruptly she demanded, ‘You aren’t going to have it, are you?’

Had the moment been less monumental, Maggie would have registered her own dismay at Vera’s callous reply.

Instead, she answered, ‘I’m afraid it’s far too late to do anything else.’

‘But they say his wife is expecting, too!’

‘Yes, she is. I’ll be raising this baby alone.’

‘Not here, I hope!’

Well, you didn’t expect sympathy, did you, Maggie? “I live here,’ she replied reasonably. ‘My business is here.’

Vera made the expected remark. “How will I ever be able to face my friends again?’

Staring at a brass drawer pull on the cabinets, Maggie felt the hurt mount. Always herself. Only herself.

Abruptly Vera launched into a tirade, her words crackling with censure. ‘I told you - didn’t I try to tell you? But, no, you wouldn’t listen, you just kept running around with him. Why, everyone in town knows about it, and they know his wife is expecting, too. I’m already embarrassed to face people on the street. What’s it going to be like when “you’re parading around with his illegitimate baby on your arm?’ Without waiting for a reply, she rushed on with more narrow concerns. ‘If you had no more self-respect than that, you might have at least considered your dad and me, Margaret. After all, we’ve got to live here for the rest of our lives.’

‘I know, Mother,’ Maggie replied meekly.

‘Well, how can we ever hold our heads up again after this?’

Maggie hung her head.

“May I now your father will stop defending you. I tried to get him to say something to you last winter, but no, he turned a blind eye like he always does. I said, “Roy, that girl is carrying on with Eric Severson and don’t tell me she isn’t!” ‘

Maggie sat silent, mollified, picturing Vera’s face growing red and her wattle quivering.

‘I said, “You give her a talking to,
Roy
, because she won’t listen to me!” Well, maybe now he’ll listen after he gets the shock of his life!’

Maggie spoke quietly. ‘Daddy already knows.’

From clear across town she could sense Vera bristle.

‘You told him, but you didn’t tell me?’ she demanded.

Sitting in silence, Maggie felt a grimmer of retaliatory satisfaction.

‘Well, isn’t that just ducky, when a daughter can’t even come to her mother first! And why didn’t he say anything to me about it?’

“I asked him not to. I thought it was something I should tell you myself.”

Vera snorted, then remarked sarcastically, ‘Well, thank you for the consideration! I’m deeply touched, I have to go now. Katy is here.’

She hung up without a good-bye, leaving Maggie holding the receiver in her lap, leaning her head against the refrigerator, her eyes closed.

I won’t cry. I won’t cry I won’t cry.

So what is he lump in your throat?

 
Daddy said it best: she’s a hard woman.

How did you expect her to react?

She’s my mother! She should be my comfort and support at a time like this.

When was she ever a comfort or a support?

The electronic hang-up tone began whining but Maggie remained motionless, gulping at the lwad in her throat until she’d mastered the compulsion to weep. From somewhere deep inside she found a reservoir of strength laced with a liberal shot of vexation and drew from it. Vehemently she replaced the receiver, picked up the phone book, found the number of the Door County Advocate and ordered, ‘Want ads, please.’

After placing an ad under HELP’ WANTED, she emptied the dishwasher, changed four beds, cleaned three bedrooms, washed two loads of towels, swept the verandahs, mixed up a batch of refrigerator muffins, staked up the daylilies that had been flattened by the storm, greeted two incoming parties, answered eight phone calls, ate a piece of watermelon, gave a final coat of paint to a piece of used wicker, took a bath, put on clean clothes (comfortable ones this time, the maternity clothes she’d been hiding) and at 4:45 P.M. refilled the parlour candy bowl. All this staunch as a midwife. Without a leaked tear.

I conceived it. I’ll accept it. I’ll overcome it. I’ll be superwoman.

I’ll do it all, by God!

Her staunchness continued throughout that night, while Katy failed to call or return, and into the next morning as Maggie began her second day of innkeeping without help; through a lunch-on-the-run (a turkey sandwich in one hand, a dustcloth in the other); through the sign-out of guests and the blessed hours of silence following their departure, before the new batch arrived.

She was still suffering under her rigid, self-imposed drought when, at
two o’clock
, the kitchen screen door opened and Brookie walked in. She caught Maggie leaning over the half-empty dishwasher gripping a sheath of clean silverware. Standing just inside the door, samurai-fashion, Brookie pinned Maggie with a look of monumental pugnacity.

‘I heard,’ she announced. ‘I figured you could use a friend.’

Maggie’s fortifications crumbled like the pediments of a fortress t d: r cannonade. The silverware clattered from her fist and she sailed into Brookie’s arms, bawling like a five year-old with a scraped knee.

‘Oh, Brookieeeee,’ she wailed.

Brookie held her fast, fierce, her own heart bounding with sympathy and relief. ‘Why didn’t you come to me? I’ve been so worried about you. I thought it was something I did, something I said. I thought maybe you weren’t happy with Todd’s work and you didn’t know how to tell me. I imagined all kinds of things. Oh, Maggie, you can’t go through this alone. Didn’t you know you could trust me?’

‘Oh, B... Brookieee,’ Maggie wailed, releasing all her despair in a blessed rain of weeping, clinging to Brookie while her shoulders shook. ‘I was s... so afraid to tell any .. o... one.’

‘Afraid? Of me?’ Cajolingly, ‘How long have you known old Brookie, huh?’

‘I kn . . . know.’ Maggie’s words were choppy with weeping. ‘But I m... must look like a t... total idiot.’