Chance (25 page)

She showed me the counted-cross-stitch ornaments and the candlewicked pillows. All the while she and the wrinklies were pumping it out of me that I was new in town, and where I lived.

“Gee, I'm your neighbor,” Deb said. “I'm Debora Michaels.”

The way she said it, every syllable stressed, Debah-rah, sounded like royalty. Always called herself Debora. She never said so, but it didn't take me long to notice she hated hearing it shortened to Deb. I called her Deb every chance I got.

“Lin Burke,” I said. That's me. Lin the loner.

“Come and meet my parents as soon as you're settled,” Deb told me breathlessly. “Any time at all. My father's family is from Connecticut. His mother's people trace back to the Mayflower. My mother's ancestors on both sides are Germans from the Brandywine. They go back to Revolutionary times, and there's a Saltzgiver buried in the cemetery at the Old Swedish Lutheran church in West Chester.”

Who the hell was she trying to impress?

Weird, that she was still living with her folks at her age, in the big brick place right next to ours, Roman blinds, corner turret. Couple days later, bored, I went over.

Mr. Michaels was home for lunch. Local bank president, courtly gentleman, none too talkative. Mrs. Michaels was a round-faced, fluffy woman. She talked enough for both. Did I like Hoadley? It wasn't what it used to be. Time was when the trains roared through day and night and the snow lay black with soot all winter. Been years since the mines and mills ran, sky glowed red toward the City. Mine owners long gone, like the elms. Took what the town had to give, raped it some say, went away. Left scars and bony piles behind.

“Good riddance,” said Debora. “The place is a lot cleaner now.”

“But the people have no work, dear,” her mother told her. “A lot of them can't meet their mortgage payments. Your father has to find ways not to foreclose.”

“I don't know why they don't move away. Move to Arizona or Nevada.”

“But their families are here, their friends are here.” Mrs. Michaels sounded shocked. Why, I didn't understand.

There were lots of things I didn't understand.

Pictures of Debora all over that house, photos, little girl in Polly Flinders dresses, expensively hand-smocked. Mary Janes, banana curls and white straw hats. Easter pictures, First Communion pictures in front of the Lutheran church. High school graduation draped shot. College, black mortar board and tassel. Banker's little girl on the front porch swing, looking down over Hoadley. Only child. I have vices, but nosiness is not one of them. Nothing struck me as odd.

Time went on. I did Christmas, started natural childbirth classes down in Steel City at the hospital, read the newspaper, learned to know Hoadley. Some place, Hoadley. Especially in deep January. Child abuse cases every second week in those houses down below Main Street, the gray-brown ones. Once in the grocery I saw a woman with a bruise on her cheek. She said she fell. Everyone laughed. Even she laughed. But I read in the paper about a woman, a big woman, nearly three hundred pounds, killed her husband. He came home drunk and ugly, and she sat on him. Sat on his chest until he was dead. Said she didn't mean to kill him. They didn't arrest her. There was another thing somebody told me about. Happened a few years before. Woman died, and when they went through her things they found babies in her attic. Five of them, all dried up, long time dead, stored in boxes.

Backward. That's what Hoadley was like, backward in time. Like the last fifty years forgot to happen. Like people were stuck in the past. People my age would tell me how Pa used to come home mean from the mines and whip them, whip all eight kids, or ten or whatever. People Pa's age would tell me how a man's pay was owed to the company store before he even got the scrip. People a generation older, still living, would tell me how they came over from the old country. Ireland, Poland, Italy, Rumania. Steerage, with their families. A younger brother died, or an older sister, or an aunt. Looking for the land of opportunity.

I would see the families on Sunday, the big families from down below Main Street, out driving in their old beat-up American-made cars, or walking to church in clothes from the Goodwill store, laughing and quarreling.

Deb came into my kitchen limping. “I about killed myself on the ice,” she complained. “It's these boots.”

Spike-heeled, periwinkle-blue Guccis, on the ice that coated the whole world at that time of year. “Don't you have something with some tread?” I grumped.

“Sensible shoes make me feel dowdy.” She took off her fur jacket. I saw that she was wearing a silk shirt and her Jordache jeans, the ones that fit so tight she had to lie down on the bed to zip them up. And never would I admit to her how good they looked with the Gucci boots. Or how good she looked. Damn, she was beautiful. Could have been a model.

“So you'd rather be dead than dowdy,” I said.

“God, Lin, you are such a party pooper.”

I saw Deb from time to time. Didn't really like her. She got on my nerves. Backward, like the town. Airheaded. Went to the Spirit Church, for Christ's sake, the one some fly-by-night preacher had started up in an empty warehouse on the edge of town, and I could guess what her longtime Lutheran parents thought of that. Saved and devout, Deb was. Intelligent, but narrow—when she got a brainstorm, she would broadcast it again and again, to different people or even to the same one. Me, for instance. Drove me up the wall. But we were sort of thrown together, being neighbors. At least she was interesting to talk with. There weren't that many people in Hoadley I liked to talk with, not once I got tired of hearing about steerage and the company store.

“I just found out the most fascinating thing,” she told me, breathless as always.

“What thing?”

“Burt Bacharach is my fourth cousin once removed on my mother's side!”

How she loved to drop names. Burt Bacharach, for God's sake. Only Deb would have cared.

She used to come over in the afternoons and drink coffee with me until Brad came home. “She's infantile,” he said after he had met her a few times.

I grinned, agreeing. She was.

“A real rich brat. Running around in her designer clothes and her Corvette when there are people living on beans and day-old bread.” He met those people in his work a lot, and it upset him. “I don't understand why you're buddying around with her.”

“She's the only person I've met in this town who ever talks about anything except hard times and the high cost of ground beef,” I said. “Anyway, she's funny.” I liked to laugh at her. Helped my ego.

Deb was active in the local genealogical society. They met twice a month in the library, a makeshift storefront place. Afternoons, since everyone was unemployed. Deb didn't have any paying job either. She had majored in American History at U. of Pitt in Pittsburgh, and then she had come home to Hoadley. No problem—she wasn't complaining, so why should I. She was more serious about her research than most people are about their salaried careers. Than most Hoadley people were about the lottery, even.

“My great-great-great aunt on the Michaels side is a matrilinear descendant of the Stuarts—”

“Ed Stewart, the lumber man over in Hemlock Bend?” I said, pretending to misunderstand.

“The
Scottish
Stuarts,” she corrected me sniffily. “As in, King James. As in, Mary Queen of Scots.”

Sure.

She was sort of an evangelist for genealogy. Had it mixed up in her half-assed religion somehow. Kept inviting me to go along to her meetings. Nothing better to do, so I would go, sit back and smirk while she and her colleagues argued about sources. Contemplating my swelling abdomen and my own superiority took up most of my attention. But one gray afternoon in the library, I got jolted out of my stupor.

There was a round of relative-upsmanship going on. Deb had indicated that a solitary French Huguenot forebear on her mother's side might be a scion of some French royal bastard—I've forgotten the details. Royalty bores me. But a blue-haired bastion of the Historical Society was bent out of shape.

“By the way, dear,” she said blandly, “I've heard news of your natural mother. Did you know that her husband has left her?”

Deb tilted her chin up an extra notch. “I read it in the newspaper,” she shot back without an instant's hesitation. “So fair of them, how they print almost everything. That Phyllis Snyder who's been passing bad checks—isn't that your niece?”

Her adversary went white, fumbled for a rebuttal, then lapsed into silence. No pussycat, Deb. No ordinary genteel banker's daughter.

Ice cool, gorgeous and unperturbed, she continued outlining her plans for researches French. Her parents had offered to pay her way overseas. I looked at her until I realized I was staring. Then looked down at my pregnant belly, knowing what I should have suspected long since. The daughter with the glossy black hair, the dark eyes and the many passions was not born of quiet John Michaels and his round-faced German wife.

Deb told me about it later, in my kitchen, over coffee. She brought up the subject herself.

“It's no secret.” She shrugged off the blue-haired wrinkly's snub. “The whole town knows I'm adopted.”

“And you know who your birth mother is?”

“Sure. She's Italian. Catholic. She used to live down at the lower end of 11th Street, but she's moved out to Mine 27 now.”

Another gridwork of gritty brown houses, at the edge of Hoadley. “Do you ever see her?”

“No!” With vehemence. “I stay away from her, and she stays away from me.”

I sat back and waited for more fireworks.

“She didn't want me,” said Deb intensely. “She gave me away.”

The woman had paved her daughter's way to easy street. But if Deb wanted to feel sorry for herself, I wasn't arguing. “How come?”

“I was a scandal. Her husband was away, working at the Lackawana mill.”

“Oh.” Better and better. “Do you know who your father was?”

“No.” Fiercely. “And I don't want to know. I don't care.”

I sat back some more.

“DeArckangelo arranged the adoption,” she said. DeArckangelo was Hoadley's most prominent lawyer. Lived in the thickly gingerbreaded house beyond Michaels's. “It was legal, and my parents told me all about it as soon as I was old enough to understand. And they never cared that my hair isn't ash blond like theirs. My mother used to fuss with it and put it up in barrettes and pincurls. She said I was pretty.”

Pathos. Deb waited for me to tell her how pretty she was. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction.

“You have brothers and sisters?”

“Half brothers. And I am not interested in researching my natural family,” she added, rather tangentially. I hadn't asked her.

“If you'll excuse a stupid question,” I said, “why are you so interested in researching your adoptive family?”

“Interested” seemed hardly the word. “Obsessed,” I should have said. She looked at me as if I had suddenly sprouted an extra head.

“Because I want to learn everything I possibly can about my ancestors. When I meet them, I want to be prepared.”

She really believed—she really thought—even though she went to that cockamamy church, I had assumed a college graduate would have outgrown believing in the afterlife. Enough for one day. I was glad to see Brad when he came home and Deb went away.

“The woman is insane,” I told him over supper.

He was in a sour mood. “That's no woman,” he said. “That's an overgrown baby.”

“Still wants her mama? But the Michaelses dote on her. Their world revolves around her.”

“I wish yours didn't,” he snapped. I goggled at him.

“I don't give a damn about her one way or another! I don't care if I never see her again.”

But I let her in when she came over the next day with more revelations for me. And there she sat at my kitchen table, earnestly explaining to me her views of the hereafter.

“Well, if heaven is what you want,” she said, “I mean, heaven is in your mind, and I started my research years ago, before roots were popular, and that's what I really want, to meet my ancestors and—and find out all the answers to all the questions I have to ask them.” Interesting theology, if somewhat disjointed. “So that's what I believe. For me.”

Silence.

“I think of it as a big family reunion,” she added dreamily. “That's my idea of heaven. Picnic tables under the elms, and wine and real china plates, and all my ancestors there in their sunbonnets or their pinstripe suits. Great-great-grandfather Israel Wheeler from Connecticut. And great-great-great-GREAT-grandmother Felicity Saltzgiver from Chester County. She had seventeen children.”

“Better her than me,” I said.

Deb ignored my irreverence. “Her husband Noah Saltzgiver fought in the Civil War,” she went on, still staring off in what was perhaps meant to be an inspirational manner. “He was decorated. I like to think sometimes that maybe someday—when I go to them, you know—maybe he will turn to Felicity, or maybe she will turn to him, and one of them will say, This is our great-great-great-great granddaughter whom we have never met.…”

All such notions aside, I hope that someday, under some circumstances, it will be remembered of me that I did not laugh at her.

“Except sometimes I worry,” she added.

“Worry about what?”

“When the research isn't going well, I get the feeling that they're keeping the answers back from me. That they don't really want me at all. They don't want me in their lives.”

Why would they? God, the woman was a lunatic.

“But then it goes better again, usually. So I guess they'll accept me after all.” Deb slumped chummily in my old kitchen chair, rendered loquacious by warmth and coffee. “You know what?”

“What.”