Black Diamond (13 page)

They made conversation, stopped, started up again, and waited. At last the carriage came to a halt.

They all got down, although they could see that they hadn’t arrived yet. They were at some kind of way-station. There was a small hut and a dim light in it. The passengers from the other carriage joined them.

They tried to get some information out of the two drivers, who didn’t speak a language any of them could understand. By signs everyone was told that they were all to keep going.

They got back into their seats and started off again. This time, they felt, they were on the last lap; they’d be welcomed with light and warmth, a drink of something: their host would give them explanations, facts, plans.

They became talkative. As Alan and Beth’s carriage moved through the forest, they called out stories to each other, leaning over the seats and saying, ‘But this is the best part,’ and, ‘You aren’t going to believe what he said then.’ They talked about funny things that had happened in their businesses, swapped anecdotes about cities they’d been in, asked each other to describe the worst and best clients they’d ever had. And they all agreed that the brochure was a problem every year.

The coachmen pulled up again at a spot so like the first one that for a moment the passengers were bewildered. ‘Isn’t this the same place?’ Myrtle asked. ‘Do you think that man knows the way?’

‘It isn’t the same‚’ Sonny told her. ‘I remember there was a log out of line up near the top there.’ He raised his arm. ‘It does look a lot like it, though.’

Nancy said, ‘At the rate we’ve been traveling, they could have fixed the roof while we were gone.’

Myron, the man in the frontier costume, came over to where they were parked. He suggested that since it was turning out to be such a long drive, they might switch around: that way, they could all be acquainted by the time they got to their destination.

Alan was happy where he was. Somebody in the other carriage, he thought, must be a bore; but there was no polite way out of the invitation. ‘Sure,’ he said. Behind him, at the same time, Ed said uncertainly, ‘Well, I guess so.’

On the third lap of the trip there was plenty of time to get to know Myron and his wife, Cora Bee. And after that, on the fourth stage, Sue and Greg, from Omaha. By the fifth and sixth times around, they all knew each other very well.

They traded family histories, got to know about the children, ex-partners and in-laws. They sang songs, played wordgames, wondered about the existence of God; and they asked themselves whether a unifying set of physical laws in the universe might do just as well as a divine being if you didn’t want to take such things personally. They tried to remember lines from poems.

Alan began to lose heart. That was another trouble with travelling: everything was out of your hands. Someone else was behind the information counter and on the telephone and at the controls of the plane. You had to wait, patiently, as if you’d given up being human and had become just a package to be
transported
. If you were used to doing your own organizing, it was difficult to put up with that. He always felt more confident when he was the one in charge.

They ran out of things to say. Beth began to feel strange again. She whispered to Alan, ‘I’m getting a funny feeling about this. It’s weird.’

‘Just relax, like I told you,’ he said, ‘and enjoy the scenery.’

She thought:
What
scenery?
There was nothing but pine boughs, the darkness and silence, except for the creaking of the wheels and the sound of the horses’ hoofs on the dirt track. There were patches of leaves on the ground, then sandy soil and pine needles, but no other variation in the landscape. She tried to think about getting to their destination; her mind went blank. But they had to stop. They had to get somewhere, otherwise nothing made sense. She made a great effort to hold within her mind some picture of the place they were meant to find. If she concentrated hard enough, they might get there.

They stopped again and changed around and started off once
more. Alan looked up at the dark shapes of the trees that passed, in unceasing progression, above and around him. Everyone nowadays worried about conservation and the environment, yet it seemed that the forest they were in was limitlessly huge, its growth encompassing time as well as space – as if they were seeing all the trees that had ever been alive since the beginning of the world. It was – like the journey itself – unending. He changed his mind. He gave up.

The two carriages continued to roll forward. The hoofbeats sounded on the track. The wheels kept turning. Eventually the others began to feel that something was wrong.

‘We’re never going to get there,’ Nancy stated. ‘This is it.’ Ed told her not to be silly: of course they were going to get there, in the end; it was just taking a long time. And if she started to complain, it was going to seem even longer.

‘I think she’s right,’ Alan said. There was no other outcome he could imagine. They were going to keep traveling, forever. ‘You’d be kidding yourself to think anything else.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Beth told him. ‘We’ll get there pretty soon now. We’ve got to.’ She was too frightened to allow for doubt. There could no longer be any question. She’d come to believe, like her friend, Ella, that all events were a matter of faith. And anyway, she’d decided that this holiday was going to make up for everything else. She’d been looking forward to it too long to let herself be disappointed.

She kept on believing. She never lost hope that if they continued to move ahead, somehow – all at once – they would reach the light. It would come upon them like a revelation of truth, a burst of sunlight. It would be amazing, overwhelming and out of this world – like the coming of spring, or like the sudden appearance of fire in the dream she and Alan had had, a long time ago, when they thought that they were dying in a plane crash.

Alma and Bruce were adopted. Their adoptive parents, Elton and Bess, had done the right thing and had told them the history of their adoption when they’d turned fourteen: Bruce first, and Alma the next year. Fourteen was the age the agencies had designated for the long, understanding talk that was to be administered with tact and kindness and which had to include at some point the phrase, ‘You know we love you, because we chose you.’ Fourteen might not have been the right age for one or the other, or both of them, to learn the facts; nor was it to be supposed that one fourteen-year-old was like another, nor that a girl would have the same attitudes as a boy. But you had to start somewhere.

They each took it differently. Bruce was horrified, infuriated, offended and sickened. Alma was strangely pleased. She began to form the notion that perhaps her mother had been someone very important – maybe even a princess – who hadn’t been able to marry her lover for reasons of state, or something like that.

To begin with, they both thought of the true parents as unreal and somehow theatrical or unusual. They didn’t feel less warmly towards Bess and Elton: on the contrary, when they’d been told how much their new parents had wanted children, how they’d been disappointed over and over again and how finally they’d been granted the great joy of two such wonderful children, Bruce had been deeply moved. And Alma had cried and had said she couldn’t imagine that her biological parents would ever have been so good to her, even if they were actually the real ones: and she was glad that she’d had the luck to be adopted.

But she began to daydream about the people she now thought
of as her real parents: the ones from whose bodies she came in a way that she didn’t yet fully understand – the way that was secret, shocking, delicious, immoral, full of pleasures, terrifying and – so everyone kept saying, even though you weren’t supposed to do it – natural.

The natural part of parenthood was simply physical. What Bess and Elton had contributed and what their years of patient care had created, was social and cultural. Alma loved them, of course. Yet there was that other element – the mysterious origins that had to do with bodily love and passion. She wondered about the two lost parents: their characters, how long they had known each other. She didn’t doubt that they’d been in love. They must have had parents, too; there would be two whole families from whom she had come, not just the two main actors.

As Alma made up stories about this other family of hers, she became increasingly curious about them. Her own imagination supplied the information, as it had invented the questions. She herself was the source and purpose of the drama. In the early stages genuine knowledge would have upset her. She definitely didn’t want to find out the truth. There were only two facts that she recognized; the first was that she was now on a different footing with Bess and Elton, so that they seemed more like friends than relatives. And the second was that Bruce was not her real brother, so that therefore there was no reason why they shouldn’t get married some day. She’d always loved him. Now she fell in love with him in another way.

Bruce had had a year to think over the subject without her. When Bess and Elton had had the talk with him, they’d asked him not to tell Alma yet. And he didn’t tell. He hadn’t told her about Santa Claus, either. Unlike so many older brothers who grow up bullying their sisters and being jealous of them, he’d always tried to shield her. The difference in their size might have had something to do with the development of his protective instincts; she’d been a small, elflike child. Another factor in his response could have been Elton, who entertained a high, idealized opinion of womanhood, and had taken care to guide Bruce towards a desire for the same, rigorous certainty. Elton
would have thought of it as one of the treasures of his son’s upbringing.

During the year in which he had the time to think about his adoption, Bruce decided: his plan came all at once, not piece by piece. It seemed to him that he’d had a shock and that it had pushed him towards the need to force everything back to the way it had been. As far as he was concerned, his purest and most private feelings had been desecrated. And Elton, whom he’d always thought of as his real father, was not only unrelated but had obviously lied to him about women.

After he’d been told that first time, Bruce never raised the topic again. He thought that it might hurt his adoptive parents’ feelings to see him express too much curiosity about the others – as if he hoped that the real ones might have been better or more interesting. He also knew what they’d say. If he asked Elton, ‘What kind of a woman do you think my real mother was?’ what could Elton tell him? That she was the kind of woman who went with a man when she wasn’t married: who had had an
illegitimate
child; and that she was the kind of woman who gave her child away to other people.

Up to the age of fourteen Bruce’s best subject in school had been history, which had filled his mind with pictures of romantic adventure. All at once he knew what history really was – not just the battles and buildings and heroes, but all the families and how they felt about each other, and how they carried with them distorted versions of each other’s lives. He realized that there was private as well as public history. Only the great names lived in such a way that the two merged, but everyone participated somehow in the large, public sweep of historical event. Everyone was influenced, willing or not. He didn’t want to be the passive victim of his own life. If you knew where you stood and what you were doing, he thought, you could direct events yourself. He intended to take action, and to run things.

As soon as Alma too had been told, he felt better. He
regarded
her as an ally in his struggle to come to terms with history. He didn’t want to say anything to make her feel crushed, as he had been, but he couldn’t understand her gullibility or her
willingness to think well of the people who had reneged on their parenthood.

‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘I guess they could be any kind of people at all.’

‘She could have been some drunken whore off the waterfront.’

‘Oh no, the adoption agencies are very careful about who they allow in.’

He laughed.

She said, ‘I think if the mothers don’t fulfill certain conditions, the babies have to go into an institution. We’ve been pretty lucky, haven’t we?’

‘The hell we have.’

‘But you’ll feel just as close to me, won’t you? Even though we aren’t really brother and sister now?’

‘Who knows? How can you be sure we aren’t related? We might be, you know. A man that’s had one bastard could have thousands.’

‘But not a woman.’

‘No. They only need to have one. That makes them whores.’

‘How can you say that? Especially nowadays. Nowadays that’s all changed. Women can keep their children and bring them up. It used to be impossible. For everybody. Maybe she couldn’t marry. Maybe he wasn’t free. He could have been already married to somebody else, or he could have died before she knew she was going to have a baby.’

‘Sure, maybe. Maybe there’s icebergs in Africa.’

‘And maybe she didn’t want to get married – have you thought about that? Maybe she was one of those independent career women who just got caught.’

‘Then she could have had an abortion, couldn’t she?’

‘That might have been against her religion. It’s possible. Maybe the idea of an abortion was worse than going through with the birth.’

‘No. If you’re going to have the baby, you don’t give it away.’

‘Maybe she couldn’t afford to keep it. It costs a lot to bring up a child. And if you don’t have a job, or some man to support you –’

‘Cut it out,’ he said.

‘Well, the way I look at it, I just feel they must have been all right.’

‘Both of them? Him and her? She might have been some girl your age who was raped by her own father. Or by a whole gang of people.’

‘Don’t say those things. I don’t want to think of her like that. And anyway, what about him?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t matter.’

Alma was already beginning to incorporate her new
knowledge
into her life. At Christmas she’d been taken to see a ballet about a transformed maiden, brought up by strangers, who had a sister-double who was her moral opposite. And although Alma was the one who was adopted, she had immediately identified the heroine as a character who must resemble her mother: an innocent beauty, preyed upon by evil influences, but in her heart shining and lovely, like a swan. ‘We might as well think nice things about them,’ she said, ‘since we’re never going to know.’

‘We can find out.’

‘No, we can’t. The adoption people never give out
information
.’

‘They don’t give it out to the real mother. That’s so she can’t come back and try to squeeze money out of the new family or upset the child by pulling it both ways. But if you’re the child, they let you find out about the mother as soon as you’re of age. You’ve got a right to that information. In the state Bess and Elton went to, and according to the adoption place, the age is eighteen, not twenty-one.’

She didn’t think that could be true. If it were possible to find out, it might even be possible to see the real parents. She said, ‘Are you sure? Suppose a woman got married afterwards and never told her husband? They couldn’t just give you her name and address. You could cause a lot of trouble for her.’

‘I’m pretty sure they can. It may not be a law. Maybe it depends on the adoption agency. The one we came from allows it.’

‘Did Mom and Dad tell you that?’

‘They told me the name and address of the agency because I asked. And then I called up and asked what the policy was. They were a little cagey but they said that if they were satisfied it was a genuine desire to know, they’d tell you. So all we’ve got to do is wait.’

Alma thought about it. She tried to see herself going to an adoption agency to talk with someone there. What were those places like? Maybe they were like hospitals, or maybe it was a clinic with a kind of office attached: the mother could be at one end, giving birth, and, at the other side of the building, the adopting parents would be waiting anxiously, hoping that the baby they got would be all right.

If a child were born with something wrong with it, did they hand it back and ask for a refund? Alma imagined Elton and Bess sitting on chairs in a waiting room: Bess would be holding a brown paper bag, to take the baby away in.

She didn’t want to think in any greater detail about the procedure. Obviously it was a business – that was the reason why some people did it. The mother would have her hospital bills paid. The agency would get something: a percentage. It was strange to think that she might have cost five hundred dollars, or a thousand, or whatever it was. But she didn’t want to ask Bess. She could think about the farcical possibilities without further information and she’d dream about the more mysterious, dramatic and possibly tragic side: the love and character of her mother.

For a long time she never even wondered if her mother had gone on living after giving birth. As soon as the question came to her, she passed it on to Bruce. ‘You don’t think they’re dead, do you?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘We might have been transferred to the adoption people because our mothers died in childbirth and there was nobody to bring us up.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that, but I don’t reckon it’s likely. That sounds to me like another case where the orphanage would take
over. The kind of place Bess and Elton would go to would be pretty fussy about where they recruited their unmarried mothers from.’

‘Not off the waterfront, after all? How can you be sure?’

‘I suspect they got the name through some religious
organization
. Don’t you think so? First, prevent them from getting hold of birth control and then sell the babies when somebody knocks them up. Wouldn’t you say someone like Reverend Hodges would know quite a few convenient little addresses?’

‘Not as many as the doctors.’

‘More. Especially in this part of the country.’

‘That’s another thing: why did they go so far away?’

‘Because that’s where the adoption place was. And I guess they figured it was a good idea to go to a big city, where they wouldn’t run the risk of adopting the child of somebody who could turn out to live right down the road. Both of those women might be there to this day. Or they might have moved away, anywhere: even out of the country.’

Alma started to tell herself another story: the search for the mother. She’d think about it in the daytime and occasionally even have a real dream. The mother was always found after long and painful effort and sometimes Alma would arrive too late, just after her mother had died.

*

Elton and Bess were quieter, more formal, more modest and also older than the parents of any of Alma’s or Bruce’s classmates. They had had to wait a long time until the adoption agency had found the first baby. Many times before that they’d been disappointed. Bruce was their idol until, so soon afterwards, Alma had arrived. They were glad to notice that the news of the adoption didn’t seem to have bothered the children. Bruce had become more serious; but that was undoubtedly just because he was growing up. His schoolwork hadn’t fallen back – that would have been a bad sign; on the contrary, it had improved. Alma too appeared as outgoing and alert as ever, although sometimes she looked unhappy. Bess had gone out of her way to say that if there was anything Alma wanted to know – anything at all about, say,
being a woman – then she could always come and talk to her, or to Dr Brewster, of course.

‘I couldn’t talk to a man about anything like that,’ Alma had said quickly.

‘Well then, maybe you could see my doctor. You’re too old to keep going to Dr Brewster now, anyhow.’

‘Is your doctor a woman?’

‘No dear, but he’s a gynecologist, so it’s all right.’

Alma said that she’d wait and see. She wouldn’t go back to Brewster, who’d been the family pediatrician, and she didn’t see why she had to go to anyone anyway, if there wasn’t anything wrong with her. However, she finally agreed to accept the name and address of a woman doctor and to have a complete check-up before the beginning of the next school year.