The English American (28 page)

“Yes,” Mum says. “I think I do.”

Through the glass I can see Boris trotting through the sitting room toward us. When he gets to the porch door he whines once, thumps his tail, turns around and lies down on the mat, with his head on his paws, waiting.

“And Jack’s been there all along, hasn’t he, Pippa?” Mum says. “The one steady thing in the midst of the chaos.”

“Yes.”

“He sounds even tidier than I am!”

“Yes,” I say, almost laughing. “I think he is. And he seems to like tidying up after me!”

Mum laughs. “He sounds perfect for you!”

“He is Mum. He was. And not just because of that. He’s—he’s the kindest man I know—and wise too. I feel at home with him. Rather, I did. But I’ve ruined everything, Mum. I’m an
idiot
.”

I start crying again as I tell her everything that’s just happened with Jack. Well, almost everything. She is my mother after all.

Finally we go inside and have supper. While I was bawling on the porch, Dad, who never cooks, had made chicken with parsnips, peas, and roast potatoes. And for pudding he’s made a chocolate cake—with extra icing—from an old World War II recipe he found in the
Peaseminster Post
.

After supper, I go upstairs to bed. I don’t wake up again until eleven o’clock the following morning.

I
T’S A RAINY AFTERNOON
,
and Dad’s got his old slide projector out. We’re in the sitting room watching slides of Mum and Dad’s first trip across America in a red Chevrolet, a year before I “arrived.” Mum’s serene and graceful and beautifully dressed, with her straight blond hair pushed back in a light blue hair band. Dad’s hair is blond too. He looks young and handsome. He’s wearing a green tartan beret and smoking a pipe. And looks—well, extremely Scottish.

Both of them are three years younger than I am now. They assume that conceiving a child of their own will be easy. They don’t know, yet, that they will have to go through the agony of discovering they can’t have children of their own. They don’t know, yet, that they will be adopting me.

In the next set of slides, I’m a bawling infant.

“That’s you, Pip. Outside the adoption agency,” Dad says.

“No, it’s not, it’s the foster home,” Mum says.

In the next picture, I’m looking up at my new mother with a peaceful expression on my face. I do not look pained, or unhappy. I look cozy in Mum’s arms. Safe.

Mum is beautifully dressed, in an elegant blue and white dress this time. Her hair has been styled in a pretty blond flip, and she’s wearing red lipstick. Dad’s wearing a tie and an elegant suit. His hand is reaching out for mine.

Mum chuckles. “The first thing Granny H. said was, ‘Look at her red hair, all spiky, sticking up like a little bird.’”

“That’s exactly what Billie wrote in the letter, just after she had me,” I say, “the very same phrase.” It’s a huge relief not to have to censor myself anymore.

“You looked just like Woodstock! From the Peanuts cartoon!” They giggle.

I look at the pictures I’ve seen many times before. Only this time, I know who the baby Pip looks like. She looks like Walt and Edwin and Ashley, and a bit like Billie too. She still looks nothing at all like the parents who adopted her.

In the following picture, I see a little red-haired girl, impeccably dressed, holding her ice cream cone reluctantly out to her father, who’s taking a big lick of it. In the next picture, she’s in a paddling pool with her little sister. In the next, she’s running naked around an English garden, in and out of croquet hoops, surrounded by doting relatives drinking tea.

In the next, she’s eight years old, camping in the Serengeti game park. There she is surrounded by other half-naked children, building the dam in the river where the hippos bathe, down the hill from where Charlotte and I got charged by the elephant.

Then there’s a picture of Charlotte and me sitting on the roof of the Land Rover as it drives bumpily along miles and miles of narrow, dusty African roads.

“Couldn’t do that now,” Dad says. “Much too dangerous. Probably get killed. By people,” he adds, to clarify.

I look at my parents, holding hands in the dark of their sitting room in the south of England. They have never kept secrets from anybody. They have never made promises they did not keep.

“Do you think you’ll move back?” Mum’s not pressuring me one way or the other. She just wants to know.

I smile. “I don’t think ‘Rock-and-Roll Redneck’ would go down all that well in England,” I say.

Then Mum says, “And your lovely Jack lives over there, doesn’t he?”

At the mention of his name my heart flips up, around, and back down again with a thud.

“He’s not ‘my Jack’ Mum. Besides…”

“Besides what?” Mum and Dad are both looking in my direction.

“Well, even if I hadn’t blown it completely, he’s in love with somebody else. And—and we’re from completely different worlds. He’d rather stay home and eat Fig Newtons than go camping!” I say, waiting for a reaffirming “Good God!” from my father. It doesn’t come.

Mum looks perplexed. Finally she says, “What’s a Fig Newton?”

“Squashed figs surrounded by squashy biscuit,” I say, missing Fig Newtons, too. Wishing I could go back to the first time Jack and I ate Fig Newtons together, knowing everything I know now, about Nick, about Jack, about myself. And start again from there.

But I can’t. It’s too late. And even if, somehow, our night together put him off this other woman…well, I behaved appallingly. He’ll certainly prefer the other woman now. I hate her almost as much as I hate myself for pretending, to both Jack and myself, that our night together wasn’t perfect. I feel like I’m going to cry again.

Dad looks at me across the light from the projector, which beams from the back of the sitting room to the screen he’s erected at the front. Dust particles swim in the light. All’s quiet, apart from the whirring of the projector and the sound of the sitting room curtain moving slightly in the breeze.

“Do you know what I think?” Dad says, adjusting the focus on a slide of Mum and Charlotte playing Snap and drinking mango juice with the Morton-Pecks.

“What do you think, Dad?”

“I think that the greatest adventures are the subtlest.”

Charlotte and Rupert hurtle down to Peaseminster the moment they learn that I’m back.

Over the next few days, we settle back into our old familiar rhythms. Charlotte and Mum take me shopping for a bridesmaid’s dress and ask my opinion on the seating plan for Charlotte and Rupert’s wedding. They’ll be getting married a year from now, so according to Charlotte there isn’t a whole lot of time.

As I try to express interest in the dresses she wants me to try on, Charlotte keeps asking me if I’m all right and I keep telling her I’m fine—old habits are never entirely broken. The main difference, perhaps, is that during the past year I appear to have lost the art of hiding what I’m really feeling from both myself and the people I love. And I no longer feel that it matters.

O
N
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
,
Mum, Dad, Charlotte, Rupert, Neville, and I are invited to go Scottish dancing at the village hall. For the first time since I can remember, I am actually looking forward to it. Dad wears his kilt and a sporran. Mum lends me her spare tartan skirt. The average age of the Scottish dancers is about seventy-five. There are about forty of them. Thirty-four women and six men. Dad is one of them.

“Come along, Pip, set to the left then to the right.” We’re dancing the Hamilton House. I am out of time, but loving being here.

“I’ll tell you the secret to Scottish dancing,” says an earnest, moon-faced woman with dark hair and a soft voice. Her face is right up against mine. “You need to count, you see. I still count, even though I’m an expert.”

I count throughout the next dance and do slightly better.

A tiny woman with a platform shoe on what I later learn is a wooden leg comes up to me.

“How lovely for Gemma and Alasdair to have you home. What is it that you do in America?” she asks.

“I sing songs to drunk people in nightclubs,” I say, smiling.

“How interesting!” Mary says, clapping her hands together in delight. “What sort of songs do you sing?”

“Well, recently I’ve been writing my own.”

“Oh, how marvelous!” she says, looking quite flushed. “How exciting!”

“It’s great fun,” I say happily. “Writing songs is like writing lots of little plays.”

“Oh, I never thought of it like that,” Mary says. “How
interesting
. Well done!”

The music is starting from the other end of the room. Dad’s voice is booming over the microphone. “Places please, everyone!”

“Now,” Mary says, eyes alight, putting one of her arms around my back and holding my arm out with her other arm, “this next one’s one of my favorites. It’s a strathspey, a nice slow one. Would you care to dance? I’ll be the man.”

“I’d be delighted,” I say, as she leads me across the floor.

Later Mum tells me that Mary lost her leg in a dreadful car crash in which her husband was killed. Terrible things happen to British people as often as they happen to Americans. The main difference, I think, is how people handle them. The British don’t tend to talk about horrid things that happened in their past. And Americans do.

Mary, I later learn, hasn’t spoken about the accident since it happened. She went on to become headmistress of St. Bart’s and, to quote Mum, “led a very successful life.” Mary doesn’t like to talk about her emotions any more than Mum does. Of course it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. To me, Mary is living proof that denial, as a way of coping, is wildly underrated.

Mary whisks me around the floor as my father barks instructions over the microphone and a science teacher in a green kilt plays the bagpipes very loudly, walking with absolute precision up and down the hall. To my surprise, I no longer want to run from the wailing music. Instead I really hear it, as if for the first time. Something deep inside me has awakened. For the first time I recognize the beauty in the ancient sound.

Only a year ago I would have done everything I could to have avoided this evening. Tonight, despite the ache in my heart over Jack, I am managing to savor every minute. When Colin Dykes spends half an hour telling me about how astounded he is by the size of American pancakes on a recent trip to Florida, I actually listen to him. American pancakes
are
huge compared to British pancakes; it’s really quite funny. I enjoy every slightly stale Hula Hoop and every sip of lukewarm orange squash.

When Marjory and Poppy come over to talk to me, I do not run away at the first excuse. Instead I share their indignation about the cost of sausages at Marks and Spencer and try not to giggle as Poppy farts in time to Strip the Willow.

I used to feel threatened by this world. Now I don’t. Now I value everything about it. Because I nearly lost it.

As my strathspey with Mary comes to an end, there is a tap on my shoulder.

“Excuse me,” the man says. “May I have the next dance?”

I turn around and, for a second, the room stands still. Because there, standing in front of me, is Jack. My American Jack. Dressed, it seems, in my father’s spare kilt and sporran and a beautifully ironed white shirt.

“Ralph told me what happened with Nick. And where you were. I somehow worked out how to call the UK,” Jack says.

Somehow I manage to speak.

“Oh Jack, I’m so sorry…”

“When I somehow managed to get through, I had a long talk with your mother. And your father. And your sister. And your cousin Neville. Who said, and I quote directly, ‘I’ve never seen her so miserable. For God’s sake get yourself on a bloody plane and get over here.’ Then your mother got back on the phone and said, ‘What he means, Jack, is that we’d be delighted if you’d like to join us at next Saturday’s Scottish dancing party. If you’re not too busy, of course.’”

I look over at Mum, Dad, Charlotte, Rupert, and Neville, who are watching from the side of the room, looking absurdly pleased with themselves.

“I like wearing a kilt,” Jack says, grinning broadly. “I have to get one when I get back to New York. It’ll help me fit right in with all the other gay guys.”

“Oh Jack, I’m so sorry!” And then, hardly daring to believe him I say, “But what about her?”

“Who?” Jack looks genuinely confused.

“The woman you’ve been in love with for a long time.”

I think I know the answer now. I hope I know the answer.

Jack looks as Scottish as my father in his kilt and white shirt, and handsome as hell.

“She’s standing right in front of me,” Jack says, softly.

The bagpipes are playing “Loch Lomond” now, but all I can hear and see is Jack.

“Pippa, it’s you,” he says. “It’s always been you.” Jack’s voice is hoarse. “I was only half alive before I met you.”

“But I’ve behaved so terribly! I’ve been so preoccupied with—well, everything but you. Oh Jack, I’m so sorry!”

Jack’s hand is shaking. I take it in mine and kiss his palm, closing my eyes with relief. When I open them, Jack takes my hands in his and says, “You needed to find out the truth about who you came from, so you could really know yourself. So you could move on, honestly, with the rest of your life. It took everything you had to survive this without going under. But you did. And now look at you.”

We’re standing very close now, in the corner of the room. I can’t speak.

“I love everything about you, Pippa,” Jack says. “I love the way you light up a room whenever you walk into it. I love your wit and voice and your charm and your kindness and your absolute bravery in the midst of total confusion. I love the fact that you have no idea how beautiful you are. I love your energy and your light and…and I love the fact that you are predictable only in your unpredictability. Most of all, Pip, most of all, I love your kindness,” he says, smiling. “And, of course, your legs.”

Jack puts his arm around my back and pulls me closer to him.

“I’ve not been able to think of anyone else but you since the moment I picked up your purse on the streets of New York,” he whispers into my ear.

“You said purse and not wallet,” I whisper back.

“I did.”

The joy is back. It’s back, back, back. It’s swimming back into me and filling me with love for the man standing in front of me. And when we kiss, I know that the journey I’ve been on has somehow freed me up to love him back. Fully. Totally. As he deserves to be loved. Without any kind of fear.

We’ve joined the other dancers now. Jack looks darkly handsome in the evening light. I can hear Poppy whispering to Marjory.

“He looks just like that American actor, doesn’t he?”

“Exactly like him. You mean Al Pacino.”

“No, the other one.”

“Which other one?”

“Tom Conti.”

“He’s not American!”

“Yes, he is.” I can hear Poppy’s fart from across the hall. I swear I can.

Their voices fade into the background. Jack is laughing. His arm feels strong in the small of my back. His face is close to mine. He smells just like Jack—this kind, wise, sexy American in a skirt, who has somehow found his way into this ordinary village hall, in an ordinary part of England, because he loves me.

“Pippa! Jack!” Dad’s voice barks into the microphone a moment later. “This is supposed to be the Gay Gordons, not a Viennese waltz!”

The other dancers are heading toward the stage. Jack and I are dancing toward the door. As we glide past Mum, Dad, Charlotte, Rupert, the piper, and Neville, who is charming Poppy’s very pretty daughter, in my mind’s eye I can see the parents who gave me birth. They’re young, beautiful, hopelessly in love, and dancing across the lobby of the Waldorf Hotel, in a world right next to this one. And then, the ghosts disappear, taking with them the remains of the whirlwind that has blown through me for so long.

Now Jack and I are walking through the front door of the village hall and out into the English air. And as we turn toward each other I feel nothing but profound love for the man standing in front of me. And, of course, the soft kiss of the English rain.