Bitter Sweet (59 page)
If only I had a man, she’d think in her weaker moments. If only I had Eric. Thoughts of him persisted, ill-advised as they were. , Then on September zz, Brookie called with some news that spun Maggie’s emotional barometer.
‘Are you sitting down?’ Brookie began.
‘Now I am.’ Maggie plunked onto the stool beside the refrigerator. “What is it?’
‘Nancy Macaffee had a miscarriage.’
Maggie sucked in a breath and felt her heart whip into overdrive.
‘It happened in
Omaha
while she was there on business.
But, Maggie, I’m afraid the rest of the news isn’t good.
Rumour has it he’s taken her on a cruise to
Saint Martin
and Saint Kitts to patch up her health and their marriage.’
Maggie felt her momentary hope plummet.
‘Maggie, are you there?’
‘Yes... yes, I’m here.’
‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but I thought you should know.’
‘Yes... yes, I’m glad you did, Brookie.’
‘Hey, kiddo, you okay?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘You want me to come over or anything?’
‘No. Listen, I’m fine. Fine! I mean it. Why, I’m... I’m practically over him!’ she claimed with forced brightness.
Practically over him? How could one ever get over the man whose only child you would bear?
The question haunted her during restless nights as she grew near term, when her body grew rounder and her sleep was interrupted by countless trips to the bathroom. When her ankles swelled and her face got puffy and she began attending Lamaze classes with
Roy
.
October came and
The inn was f-died every night, and all the guests seemed to be in love. They came by twos, always by twos. Maggie watched them saunter toward the lake, hand in hand, and sit in the arbour seat studying the reflection of the maples which burned like live flames on the blue, calm waters.
Sometimes they’d kiss. And sometimes risk a brief intimate caress before returning upyard with a look of replenishment on their faces.
Watching them, Maggie would retreat from the window, cradle her distended abdomen and relive the days of requited touches with a bittersweet longing. Observing the rest of the world passing two-by-two, she anticipated the birth of her child as one of the loneliest things she would ever live through.
‘We’ll do fine,’ she’d say aloud to the one she carried.
‘We’ve got your grandpa, and Brookie, and plenty of money, plus this grand house. And when you’re old enough, we’ll buy that sailboat, and I’ll teach you to become a ragman, and you and I will sail to
Chicago
. We’ll do fine.’
One afternoon in late October, during a spell of Indian summer weather, she decided to walk uptown to get her mail. She dressed in a pair of black knit slacks and a rust-and-black maternity sweater and left a note on the door: Back at
.
The poplars and maples were already bare, and the oaks were shedding their leaves along Cottage Row as she headed down the hill. Squirrels were busy gathering acorns, racing across her path. The sky was intense blue. The leaves rustled as she walked through them.
Uptown the street was quieter. Most of the boats were gone from the docks. Some of the shops had already closed for the season, and those remaining open had little foot traffic. The flowers along
The post office lobby was empty - a tiny yellow space surrounding the service window, which was unmanned as Maggie entered. She went straight to her box, got her mail, slammed the door and turned to find Eric Severson not ten feet behind her.
They both came to a standstill.
Her heart began pounding.
His face flushed.
‘Maggie.. ‘ he spoke first. ‘Hello.’
She stood rooted, feeling as if the blood were going to beat its way out her cars and splatter the lobby wall.
Spellbound by his presence. Absorbing the familiar- tan face, bleached hair, blue eyes. Decrying the unfamiliar brown jeans, a plaid shirt, a puffy down vest - which created an absurd sense of deprivation, as if she’d been cheated of the time during which he’d acquired them.
‘Hello, Eric.’
His eyes dropped to her maternity sweater, belled out by the protruding load she carried.
Please she prayed, don’t let anyone else walk in.
She saw him swallow and drag his eyes back to her face.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ she replied in a queer, reedy voice. ‘I’m just… just fine.’ Unconsciously she shielded her stomach with a handful of mail. ‘How are you?’
‘I’ve been happier,’ he replied, studying her eyes with a look of torment in his own.
‘I heard about your wife losing the baby. I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, well ... sometimes those things ... you know...’ His words trailed away as his gaze returned to her girth as if it exerted some cosmic magnetic force. The seconds stretched like light-years while he stood rapt, his Adam’s apple working in his throat. In the back room a piece of machinery rattled and somebody rolled a heavy cart across the floor. When he looked up her eyes skittered away.
I unaersana you took a enp, snc sago, groping reasons to linger.
‘Yes, to the
Caribbean
. I thought it might help her... us, to recover.’
Hattie Hockenbarger, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the postal service, appeared in the window, opened a drawer and replenished her supply of postcards.
‘Beauty of a day, isn’t it?’ she addressed them both.
They shot her a pair of distracted glances, but neither of them said a word, only watched her depart around a high wall before returning to their interrupted conversation and their fixation with one another.
“She’s having trouble getting over it,’ Eric murmured.
‘Yes, well...’ Finding little to say on the subject, Maggie lapsed into silence.
He broke it after several seconds, his voice throaty, verging on emotional, too soft to be heard beyond the quiet lobby. ‘Maggie, you look wonderful.’
So do you. She would not say it, would not look at him, looked instead at the WANTED posters hanging on the wall while firing a smoke screen of chatter. ‘The doctor says I’m healthy as a horse, and Daddy has agreed to be my coach when the baby is born. We go to Lamaze classes twice month, and I’m actually getting quite good at Kagel exercises, so...l...we...’
He touched her arm and she became silent, unable to resist the gravity of his eyes. Looking into them she became despairing because, clearly, his feelings hadn’t changed. He hurt as she hurt.
‘Do you know what it is, Maggie?’ he whispered. ‘A girl or a boy?’
Don’t do this, don’t care! Not if I can’t have you!
In a moment Maggie’s throat would close completely. In a moment her tears would well over. In a moment she’d be making an even greater fool of herself in the middle of the post office lobby.
,taggc, oo you gnuw: ‘No,’ she whispered.
‘Do you need anything? Money, anything?’
‘No.’ Just you.
The door opened and Althea Munne walked in, followed by Mark Brodie, who was speaking. ‘I heard Coach Beck is starting Mueiler tomorrow night. Should be a good game.
Let’s just hope this warm weather...’ He glanced up and seemed to go mute. He held the door open long after Althea passed into the lobby. His glance darted between Maggie and Eric.
She recovered enough poise to say, “Hello, Mark.’
‘Hello, Maggie. Eric.” He nodded and let the door close.
The three of them stood in a tableau of awkwardness, observed closely by Althea Munne and Hattie Hockenbarger who’d returned to her window at the sound of the door opening.
Mark’s eyes dropped to Maggie’s stomach and his cheeks turned pink. He had not called her since the rumours began circulating about her and Eric.
‘Listen, I have to go, I have guests coming in,’ Maggie extemporized, affecting a cheerful smile. ‘Nice to see you, Mark. Althea, hi, how are you?’ She rushed out the door in a welter of emotions, red-faced and trembling, unspeakably close to tears. Outside, she bumped the shoulders of two tourists as she hurtled along the sidewalk. She had planned to stop at the store and pick up some hamburger for supper, but Daddy would surely see she was upset and ask questions.
She plodded up the hill oblivious to the beautiful afternoon, the spicy smell of the fallen leaves.
Eric, Eric, Eric.
How can I live here the rest of my life, running into him now and then like I just did? It was traumatic enough today; it would be untenable with his child’s hand in mine. A picture flashed through her mind: herself and their child, a son, entering the post office two years from now and encountering the big, blond man with the haunted eyes who would be unable to tear his gaze off them. And the child, looking up, asking, ‘Mommy, who’s that man?’
She simply could not do it. It had nothing to do with shame. It had to do with love. A love that stubbornly refused to wither, no matter how ill-advised. A love that, with each accidental encounter, would herald their feelings as unmistakably as these fallen leaves heralded the end of summer.
I simply cannot do it, she thought as she approached the house she had grown to love. I cannot live here with his child, but without him, and my only alternative is to leave.
Chapter 19
It had been a tense summer for Nancy Macaffee. Feigning pregnancy had put her on edge, and had not brought back Eric’s affection as she’d hoped. He remained distant and troubled, scarcely ever touching her, speaking to her about only the most perfunctory things. He spent more time than ever on the boat, leaving her alone most of the weekends she was at home.
His only sign of remorse came when she had called him from ‘
Saint Joseph
’s Hospital’ in
Omaha
to tell him she’d had a miscarriage. He had suggested the trip to the
Bahamas
to get her back on her feet, and had willingly cancelled a week of charter bookings to take her there. On the islands, however, beneath the spell of the tropics, where their love should have reblossomed if it were going to, he remained introspective and uncommunicative.
Back at home she had taken a month off, willing to try domestic science in a last-ditch effort to regain his esteem.
She spent her days calling his mother for bread recipes, putting fabric softener in their laundry and wax on their floors, but she hated every minute of it. Her life felt pointless without the challenge of sales quotas and the high-tension pace of weekly travel schedules; without dressing up each day and jumping into the mainstream of the retail business where people had flair and style and the same kind of aggressiveness upon which she thrived.
Her time at home proved futile, for Eric sensed her restlessness and said, ‘You might as well go back to work. I can tell you’re going crazy here.’
In October she followed his advice.
But she continued searching for ways to win him back.
Her most recent campaign involved his family.
‘Darling,’ she said, one Friday night when he’d come home at a reasonable hour. ‘I thought maybe we’d invite Mike and Barbara over Sunday night. It’s been my fault we haven’t had friendlier relations with them, but I intend to remedy that. How about inviting them for supper? We could do linguini and clam sauce.’
‘Fine,’ he said indifferently. He was sitting at the kitchen table doing company bookwork, wearing glasses and a fresh haircut that made him look militarily clean. He had a wonderful profile. Straight nose, arched lips, pleasing chin - like a young Charles Lindbergh. The sight of him never failed to tighten her vitals when she remembered how it used to be between them. Would he never touch her sexually again?
She squatted beside his chair, crooked a wrist over his shoulder and flicked his earlobe with a finger. ‘Hey...’
He glanced up.
I’m really trying here.’
He pushed up his glasses. The pencil moved on. ‘
Nancy
, I have work to do.’
She persisted. ‘You said you wanted a baby... I tried that. You said I snubbed your family. I admit I have and I’m trying to make up for it. You said you wanted me to stay home. I’ve done that, too, but it didn’t serve any purpose whatsoever. What am I doing wrong, Eric?’
Again the pencil stopped, but he didn’t look up.
‘Nothing...’ he answered. ‘Nothing.’
She stood, slipping her hands into her skirt pockets, crushed by the admission she’d been denying all these weeks, an admission that made her seize up with dread and insecurity.