Blessings (4 page)

A busy life it had been, a productive and useful one, but it had led nowhere in particular, and when all was said and done, there had been a coolness at its heart.

Until Jay had come into it. Almost two years it was now, and here they were.

Her reflections ended, Jennie wiped the pearls as she had been advised to do, laid them carefully on their velvet cushion, and hid the box under her nightgowns. Undressed, she regarded herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. Not bad. She had never had much trouble keeping her weight down, which was a blessing because she loved food, good rich pastas and lots of bread. No flab, either, thanks to tennis and running. Humming to herself, she whirled and did a little dance in front of the mirror. Happy, happy—

The telephone rang.

“Is this Janine Rakowsky?” Janine. Nobody except her mother called her that anymore.

“Yes,” she answered cautiously.

“My name is James Riley.” The voice was courteous and refined. “I know that what I’m going to say will startle you, but—”

Mom. An accident in Florida. Mom’s hurt. In the flash of a second, brakes yelp. Rain glitters on the highway. Sirens. Police converge. An ambulance comes racing. Red lights revolve.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“No, no,” the man said quickly. “Nothing bad. I’m sorry I frightened you. It’s just this. I represent a service for adoptees. We’re called Birth Search. You’ve probably heard about us.”

“I don’t believe so.” She was puzzled. “Are you in need of an attorney?”

“Oh, no. This isn’t a legal matter. It’s this way—”

She seemed to see the man settled back for a lengthy explanation, and so she interrupted quietly. “I’m an attorney, so since it’s not a legal matter, I really don’t have time to talk. I’m sorry—”

Now it was he who, with equal quietness, interrupted.

“If you’ll just give me a minute or two, I’ll explain. You’re aware, I’m sure, of the numbers of adoptees who are now seeking their natural parents. So many organizations have sprung up to help, of which ours is just one, and we—”

A long sigh quivered in Jennie’s chest. “I give as much to charity as I can afford. If you’ll send me a brochure describing your work, I’ll read it,” she said.

The man wasn’t about to let go. “This isn’t a call for charity, Miss Rakowsky.” There was a long pause. When he spoke again, it was almost in a whisper. “You gave birth to a girl nineteen years ago.”

Seconds passed. The second hand jerked and ticked on the desk clock. Small crackling sounds came over the wire, or maybe they were the sounds of blood rushing in the arteries.

“She’s been searching for more than a year. She wants to see you.”

I’m going to be sick, Jennie thought. I’m going to faint. She sat down.

“I called you at home rather than at your office, since this is so personal.”

She couldn’t speak.

“Are you there? Miss Rakowsky?”

“No!” A terrible sound tore out of Jennie’s throat, as if she had been cut without anesthesia. “No! It’s impossible! I can’t!”

“I understand. Yes. Of course this is a shock to you. That’s why your daughter wanted us—me—to call first.” A pause. “Her name is Victoria Miller. She’s called Jill. She’s here in the city, a sophomore at Barnard.”

Cold fingers ran on Jennie’s spine. Her leaping, crazy heart accelerated.

“It’s impossible… . For God’s sake, don’t you see it’s impossible? We don’t know each other.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it? That you ought to know each other?”

“It’s not the point! I put her in good hands. Do you think I would have let them give her away to just anybody? Do you?”

Now Jennie’s voice squealed and ended with a sobbing breath.

“No, I certainly don’t think you would, but—”

“Why? Is there something wrong with her? Has something happened to her?”

“Not a thing. She’s quite happy and well adjusted.”

“There! You see? I told you! So she has a family, they’re taking care of her. What does she want with me? I never even saw her face. I—” Clutching the phone, Jennie sank to the floor and leaned against the desk for support.

“Yes, she has a family, a very good one. But she wants to know you. Isn’t it natural for her to want to know who you are?” The voice was quiet and reasonable.

“No! No! It’s over, it’s ancient history. Everything was settled. When things are settled, leave them alone. I couldn’t have taken care of her then! You don’t know what it was like! I had to give her away. I—”

“No one is saying a word about that, Miss Rakowsky, it’s well understood. We’re all professionals here, psychologists and social workers, and we do understand. I understand you. Believe me, I do.”

Sweat poured on Jennie’s palms and all over her body. The sweat, the racing heart, and the weakness in her legs were terrifying in themselves. She had to pull herself together, had to; she couldn’t collapse here, have a heart attack alone—

“Jill is a delightful young woman, very intelligent,” the voice coaxed. “You would—”

“No, I said! There’s no sense in it! We can’t just—just start up after nineteen years. Oh, please!” Now she wept. “Please tell her it’s impossible. Tell her to be happy and to leave me alone. Forget this. It’s better for her the way it is. I know it’s better. Please. For God’s sake, go away and leave me alone! Oh, please!”

“Miss Rakowsky, I won’t bother you anymore now. Take a few days to think it over. I believe, if you try, you’ll understand it’s not such a bad thing, not a tragedy. I’ll talk to you again.”

“No! I don’t want to talk to you again. I—”

The connection was broken.

She laid her head back against the desk, holding the dead phone in her lap. Her heart still hammered so fiercely that she could hear it in her ears.

“Oh, my God!” she said aloud. “Oh, my God!” She closed her eyes and put her head down between her knees.

“I’m going to vomit, I’m going to faint. …”

When she opened her eyes, the pattern on the big chair was spinning. Brown, white, and black circles, squares, dots, and stars flickered and flashed. She closed her eyes again, squeezing the lids against the eyeballs.

All these years. I didn’t want to remember her. I had to forget her, didn’t I? And sometimes I did forget her. But other times? I don’t dare think of the other times …

“Don’t you see?” she cried out into the silent room, cried out to no one, to everyone, to the world, the fates. “Don’t you see?

“Oh, my God …” she sobbed. With her hands over her face, she rocked and sobbed.

After a long while then, her mind began to click. She summoned it now, the little machine in her head, to take control lest she fly apart and scatter in broken pieces.

Think, Jennie. You can’t afford to panic. There’s an intelligent way of handling everything, isn’t there? You always tell other people so. Now tell yourself. Think.

The phone rang again. Muffled in the folds of her bathrobe, it sounded far away.

“You didn’t call me,” Jay said.

She went blank. “Call?”

“Your line was busy.”

“Yes, it was a client.”

“Must they bother you on Sunday too?”

“Well, it happens sometimes.” She began to babble. “The landlord’s been harassing the woman. It’s awful. And Shirley was here, so I couldn’t use the phone, anyway. She just left this minute. I couldn’t get rid of her.”

Jay laughed. “She’ll miss you, that one. Oh, wasn’t this a perfect day? I’m just sitting here thinking about it.”

“A perfect weekend. Yes, it was.”

“We still haven’t gotten your ring. Can I pin you down one afternoon this week?”

How can I just suddenly produce a child? If I had told him the first day—

He spoke again, interrupting her thoughts. “We’ll go to Cartier’s. It won’t take long.”

“Jay, I don’t need such an expensive ring. Really I don’t.”

“Jennie, don’t be a nuisance, will you? Don’t argue with me. Go to sleep. I’m half asleep already. Good night, darling.”

She hung up and cried out loud into the room. “My God, what am I going to do?”

Walk into the family all of a sudden with a nineteen-year-old daughter, dropped down from nowhere … Jay’s babies … the wedding just a couple of months away … the Wolfes, that decorous, trusting, honorable pair. Liberal. Decent. But never fool yourself, the code behind the pleasant surface is a rigid one. And Jay … I’ve lied… . Concealment like this, all this time, is a lie and nothing but. Yes … yes.

An intelligent girl, the man had said. Jill, they call her.

Why should she want me? I’m the one who gave her away. Poor baby. Given away. She came out of me, out of the very core of me. I heard the newborn squall of protest, and that was all, one pitiable, helpless cry, and then they carried her out, a small wrapped bundle carried out of the room, out of my life. Does she look at all like me? Would I feel any recognition if I were to meet her someplace, not knowing who she is? But I did right. You know you did right, Jennie. And she can’t come back into your life now. She can’t. It won’t work. Think, I told you. But I can’t think. I haven’t got the strength. I’m drained.

After a while she got up from the floor, turned off the lights, and, still huddled in the bathrobe, lay down on the bed. She had begun to shiver. For a long time she lay with the quilt drawn over her head. Absolutely alone …

Alone, just as she had been on that bus heading back east from Nebraska. It felt the same. She could smell the exhaust again and swallow the threat of nausea as the bus swung, lurching too fast through all the monotonous small towns, passing the supermarkets, used-car lots, and malls, going back to pick up a life. Going back …

I
t begins in the Baltimore row house, in the kitchen over a cup of tea after the supper dishes have been washed and put away. Sometimes, rarely, perhaps on the Sabbath, the tea is drunk in the cluttered front room where dust gathers on the paper flowers. The sofa and chairs are covered with plastic sheets except when there’s company, and the blinds are darkly drawn to keep the meager north light from fading the carpet. “Blue is the most perishable color,” Mom says.

Actually, the story begins even farther back than Baltimore, for is not each of us only the latest link in a long, binding chain? It begins in Lithuania, in a town with an unpronounceable name, near Vilna, the city of great scholars. Mom’s parents, who were not scholars, peddled horseradish for a living. “If you can call it a living,” Mom says. It is a simple story that she tells, and yet with each repetition she has something with which to embellish it, some comical or pathetic anecdote. The part when the family leaves for France is dramatic, with the pathos of departure and the adventure of novelty. There is new scenery, another language, and for the little girl, Masha, a new name: Marlene. She goes to school wearing a pinafore, like any little French girl. It does not take her long to feel French, to lose all but the vaguest graying memory of the muddy road to Vilna. Then the Germans come, and the girl learns that she is, after all, not French. Her parents are taken away back east again, to be consumed in the fires. And she, in some miraculous fashion, is swept up into a group of fleeing refugees and brought to America.

“We came across the Pyrenees. You wouldn’t believe —I can’t believe it myself—how we did it, Janine.”

Janine, the name she has given to her daughter in memory of Jacob, her father, is the last, wistful, prideful memento of her short-lived Frenchness.

“There were German patrols and observation planes. We had to hide among the trees, we had to climb above the treeline, climb through the rocks in the terrible cold. A man had a heart attack and died there… .

“Well, I got here, anyway. I was sixteen. I had no money at all, and not nearly enough education to do much. But then I got lucky. I met Sam.”

Sam, too, has a story to tell. Unlike his wife, though, he refuses to tell it. It is through her mother that Jennie learns how Pop survived the concentration camp: An expert tailor, he was put to use making uniforms for the Germans. He has unspeakable memories, and now he will not touch a needle, except that once in a long while he will copy a suit or coat from Vogue for his wife or daughter. He is more or less cheerful in his delicatessen, making sandwiches and ladling salads, while Mom takes the cash.

Jennie is an only child. Her parents’ labor is for her alone. Their savings, the things they do not buy for themselves, and the vacations they do not take are all for her. They never say so, but she knows it. She is aware that they are giving her “good values”: work, family, respectability, and education. Their daughter must have the education they missed. The world’s evil must not touch her. They keep her safe.

Pop is the more religious parent. Orthodox, he closes the store on Saturdays, even though it could be the busiest day of the week. He is clean-mouthed; she has never once even heard him swear. She thinks she will remember him best at the table on Friday nights, washing his hands before prayers, while her mother holds the basin and the little white towel, and the flames waver in the brass candlesticks.

Jennie doesn’t share all their beliefs, but she respects their beliefs and them. They are gentle parents, overworked, grateful for what they have, disappointed over what they missed, and sometimes remote; lost, she understands, in their remembered experiences. And while, even when she was still in high school, she knew she would leave their world, she also knows that in spirit at least she will always be part of it.

“So he lives in Atlanta?” Mom says. Her hair is in curlers. She looks chubby, even in her enveloping house-dress. Now she frowns a little, trying to decipher the letter’s smart-looking backhand script. It is a woman’s writing on thick gray paper. The envelope is lined and the paper is engraved in navy blue. Mom runs a finger over the raised letters. “Nice that the mother writes to invite you.”

“Mom, it’s proper. She’s supposed to.”

“Atlanta—it’s far?”

“Only a couple of hours by plane.” Jennie feels delightful excitement. “They live in the suburbs. They’ll meet us at the airport.”

“They’re rich people, I suppose.”