Blessings (28 page)

“That’s not true!” The cool, calm surface cracked. “I never said I didn’t. I tried to explain, but she didn’t give me a proper chance, just stood up and ran out in a temper.”

“I can imagine. She’s impulsive, or just plain young. Don’t you remember being young?”

“All too well!”

There was a moment’s pause before Peter spoke again. “Jill said you looked wonderful.”

“That’s nice. That should make me very happy, I’m sure.”

“Jennie, please. Give her a chance.”

“I thought I gave her a chance.”

“You did, and it didn’t work. Okay. But will you try once more? Really, you should.”

This man, resurrected out of a buried nightmare, has the nerve to tell me what I should do! she thought angrily.

“I’m staying at the Waldorf.”

The Waldorf. Yes, only the best. Staying with his wife, maybe? God only knows.

“… dinner tonight,” he was saying. “The three of us. I’d like to make peace between the two of you.”

It wasn’t in her, after all, to ignore sincerity. And she replied quietly, “I’ve thought about this—I’ve thought of very little else these past weeks. It would have been so much better if she’d never found us. Found me, anyway. I don’t know about you.”

“As for me, I have to say I’m glad she did. I never dreamed it would happen, but now that it has, I’m glad. I’ve had my share of shame over the years, Jennie. I don’t think there are words enough in the language to express my sorrow over what I did.”

Against her will, she was moved. The phrase over the years made a falling cadence, an echo remote, nostalgic, sorrowful, and lost. She saw him standing at the airport gate with arm upraised in farewell, a bewildered, anxious, frightened, useless boy.

“So, will you?” he pleaded. “Tonight at seven? It’s not for my sake. I have no right to expect anything from you. It’s for her. She tried so hard to find us and looked so long.”

“I don’t want to,” Jennie said very low, but thought, And yet, in another way, I do.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I don’t want to,” she repeated, and cried out suddenly. “There’s too much pain here! Too much pain!”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You didn’t give birth to her.”

“Mine’s a different kind of hurt. It concerns you; what I did, and didn’t do, to you.”

“Peter, this talk serves no purpose. You’re tearing open a wound that healed a long time ago. Don’t do it, please.”

“All right, I won’t. But will you come tonight, however hard it is? Please?”

How could she refuse? “I suppose I’ll have to.”

“I’ll wait for you in the lobby on the Park Avenue side. Will I know you? I mean, you haven’t dyed your hair or anything?”

“I look the same.”

“At seven, then.”

“At seven.”

She looked up to face a blur of rain on the greasy window glass. Vague impulses stirred and mingled: reluctance and a trembling dread, along with an unfamiliar sense of fatefulness. As rational and practical as Jennie was, she scorned the idea that anything could be “ordained.” Yet it seemed as though this happening today were inevitable, as if everything in the past had been treacherously, secretly moving toward it.

Now, although it was not easy to admit, she felt a touch of curiosity to know whether or how in nineteen years Peter had changed. And there was something more: Really, she wanted him to see how well she had survived, how successful she was, and how desirable still. It embarrassed her to have such a foolish wish, but there it was.

She was to meet Jay for dinner tonight. Now, what excuse to give? Biting her lips, she frowned and thought, then thought some more. He wouldn’t be pleased with any reason, that was sure. And Mom always said she wasn’t a good liar, that anyone could see through her excuses. But she had to find something plausible. Finally she concluded: a client. That would do. A poor woman who works late and has to be seen in the evening. That was something he would understand and condone.

She picked up the telephone. Lie upon lie, the edifice was building higher.

H
e came striding from the bank of elevators down through the carpeted, gilded splendor of the lobby. Tourists clustered, bearing cameras; women in glittering formal dress on their way to grand events moved past; but the tall man with the red-crowned head stood out in the diverse crowd. For an instant he stood scanning the scene; then, finding Jennie, he came swiftly toward her with both hands outstretched.

“Hello, Jennie.”

“Hello, Peter.”

They shook hands. The gesture was curiously formal. She wasn’t sure what she had expected him to do—or expected herself to do, for that matter.

“Gosh, Jennie, you’re right,” he said. “You really are just the same.”

“And so are you.”

The bright opal eyes still smiled. The voice still had the old ring that could bring enthusiasm to the most simple remark.

Then simultaneously they remembered Jill, who, standing slightly in back of Peter, was regarding them both with open curiosity. Peter put his arm around Jill, pulling her close.

“This is an historic moment, and it calls for champagne. I don’t know what the drinking age is in New York, but whatever it is, you’re going to have champagne tonight, Jill.”

Jill didn’t answer. Perhaps she didn’t want to acknowledge Jennie, or perhaps she was only waiting for Jennie to speak first.

“Hello, Jill,” Jennie said. “We meet again, don’t we?” Conciliatory, pleading.

“Hello.” The tone was flat.

“Well,” Peter said, obviously choosing to ignore the awkwardness, “it’s past time, and we’ve a table waiting.”

Jennie fell deliberately behind and followed them. They shine together, she was thinking. They have the same walk, with long, springing, almost loping steps. Without knowing it, Jill was a Mendes. Suddenly Jennie felt too small, despised herself for the feeling, and did not understand it.

At Peacock Alley they turned left, entered the restaurant, and were led to a table on which stood an arrangement of pink roses. Peter had made a celebration. Another pink rose lay across Jennie’s plate and Jill’s. Beside each of the two plates was a little blue Tiffany box tied with white ribbon.

“Open them,” he commanded. His face sparkled when two identical silver bangle bracelets emerged from their tissue-paper nests. “They did me a special favor with the engraving, a rush job.”

Jennie’s bore, in a swirl of old-fashioned script, the words “From Jill to Jennie with love” and the date. Obviously Jill’s must say the reverse. What a childish gesture, in spite of being kind and well meant! As if this conjunction of three human beings who, in their various ways, were suffering through these moments, were a festival!

“I want you to remember this day,” Peter told them.

As if it were a day one could forget.

Jill spoke first. “It’s lovely. It goes with my necklace.” She had taken off her beaver jacket, revealing a silver chain worn over a gray wool dress.

Jennie followed. “Yes, lovely. Thank you, Peter.”

“Let’s order, shall we? Then we can talk. We’ve a lot to talk about.” He kept smiling. He was working hard to stimulate them. “How about shrimp for an appetizer? Or else soup? It always goes well on a cold night. I got the hot-soup habit from living in Chicago. That wind off Lake Michigan took some getting used to after living in Georgia most of my life, let me tell you. I think I’ll try the lobster bisque myself. But take your time, you two, no hurry.” He went through the menu. “Veal. Swordfish. Let’s see, filet mignon sounds good, doesn’t it? Can’t make up my mind.”

Jennie urged silently, Do stop trying so hard, will you? It’s foolish, it’s crazy, being here like this. If all the elegant people in this room could know who we are, they’d have something else to talk about. “Fantastic,” they’d say… . Why did I come here? Oh, I know very well why I came… .

But it wasn’t going to work, because Jill obviously intended to ignore her. She, too, probably had been coaxed to this meeting against her will. Nevertheless she was eating heartily, while carrying on a dialogue with Peter. It seemed almost as if they were in league against Jennie. No, that was absurd; Peter wasn’t a man to be in league with anyone or against anyone. That much she remembered. He simply wasn’t aware of Jennie’s exclusion, or of the charged atmosphere.

When the champagne was poured, Peter raised his glass. “To health and happiness and peace among us.”

Jennie’s swallow, on a churning stomach, sickened her. When she put down the goblet, he looked anxious.

“Don’t you like it? It’s Dom Perignon.”

“It’s excellent, but I’m usually a Perrier woman.”

“I remember when you were a ginger-ale woman.”

She could have corrected him: I wasn’t a woman. I was a girl, a child who turned into a woman too soon. But the reminder would have been brutal and would have served no purpose, anyway.

The dialogue, like a volleyball, passed over her bent head while she tried to eat.

“There’s no landscape like it,” Jill was saying. “All those miles of yellow and cedar and pifion. And the sweet air. Nothing like that anywhere, either.”

“And quivering aspen along the river,” added Peter, and said to Jennie, “Jill says you talked about New Mexico together. She knows a lot about the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, probably more than I do. I only spent a couple of weeks two summers ago, mostly studying the kivas. Religious meeting places, council houses. Below ground. Very interesting. But you probably know about them.”

“No, not a thing,” Jennie said, refusing to help him.

For a moment he looked pleading and hurt, then, once more mustering cheer, he returned to the land of mes-quite and staghorn cactus.

As for me, I’m done with pleading, Jennie thought. I can’t even as much as catch Jill’s glance, although I know that when she thinks I can’t see her, she is examining me slyly. Perhaps she’s trying to imagine the primal scene— don’t we all at some time or other? At least they say we do. Yes, it was a warm, silent evening, the gravel on the driveway smelled of dust, and we had to hurry before they all came home. That’s how it was. That’s how you come to be sitting at the Waldorf Astoria, Jill, in your fine dress and your dignity, with your poor heart pounding, as it must be.

“I feel sort of melancholy when I’ve wasted a day,” Jill was saying, “because it can’t be retrieved. There’s one less day to live. It’s not that I need to have accomplished anything much. It’s more that I need to have been aware and really alive.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Peter was eager again. “I’m the same way myself. I suppose we’ll be finding more and more ways in which we’re alike.”

Jennie laid the fork on the plate. The food simply would not go down. This Situation—years ago she had capitalized it in her mind, and did so now—was intolerable. Like an octopus, Jennie’s anger reached out now, stretching its tentacles toward the two across the table, and then sucked back into itself, disgusted. How quickly she had changed! In a few short weeks her cherished confidence in herself had vanished. And they just went on talking, those two, their glib words pouring, unhampered by whatever inner turmoil they might be undergoing. Yet they were in control.

She reached into her purse for her lipstick, which she did not need. In the little mirror her wounded eyes were darkly circled.

“Jennie, you’ve not said a word. Come talk to us,” Peter urged.

It was as if he were delicately reprimanding a sulky or a bashful child. What could he be thinking of? Surely he must see that Jill wasn’t speaking to her.

“It’s pretty obvious why I’m not talking,” she replied.

Peter put down his fork. “All right. All right. Time to get down to brass tacks, I see. You two have to get to—

gether, you know you do. You have to reach some understanding.”

“Nobody has to do anything,” Jennie said. “This is a false situation to begin with.”

“I don’t see anything false in a girl’s wanting to know her parents.”

“Maybe not. If it worked out smoothly for everyone, it would be wonderful. But this hasn’t worked smoothly, and you can’t force it to, Peter. Nor can I.”

“But it happens that I’m certain you can, Jennie. Why don’t you want to accept our daughter completely, with no secrecy? What are you hiding from?”

The words our daughter and hiding enraged her. “You may not question me!” she cried. “You just may not, do you hear? Who do you think you are, you of all people, to question me?”

Hurt and reproachful, Peter said, “Well, if you’re going to be so hostile—” when Jill interrupted.

“The first time I see the two of you together—the first time, mind you, a thing I dreamed about—you fight! It’s unbelievable! You actually fight! I used to imagine—” She stopped. “I’m all choked up. Oh, why didn’t you marry each other and keep me? Keep your own child? Why? Oh, I don’t even know what I’m saying. But look at this mess you’ve made! Look at it!”

Jennie turned to Peter. His flush was as painful as newly grown skin after a burn. Under lowered lids his eyes glistened. She saw that he was stricken, unable to reply, and in a flash she understood his memories: the windshield wipers clicking in the rain on the dark street and his own words, “Jennie, Jennie, don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.” In that second, pity for him, and for them all, obliterated anger.

Jill’s tears spilled and she moved aside in the chair, showing to Jennie only her profile, humiliated as a woman is by public tears. The silence that fell upon the flower-decked table and its pathetic gaiety was accentuated by a burst of laughter that rose somewhere above the moderate buzzing in the room. Dismayed by Jill’s pain, neither Jennie nor Peter could meet each other’s glance.

Presently Jill dabbed at her eyes and took a sip of water. Jennie waited with resignation. Peter’s flush had still not died down, but he began to speak cautiously, as if addressing the air.

“This is too much for us all. I should have known it would be. It was stupid of me to expect it to go smoothly.” No one refuted him. His fingers made nervous taps on the tablecloth, as if he were considering something. Then, abandoning the empty air, he addressed Jennie. “A restaurant is no place to talk our hearts out,” he continued. “I know you and Jill broke up at your lunch because she wanted to go back to your apartment and you wouldn’t. I thought that was such a strange issue! Maybe, if you’d make it clearer, it would help us.”