The Unwelcomed Child Read online

  “Dad had to poke it through a hole in a sheet she had wrapped around her.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” she said, and then we both laughed.

  How did they get to be that way? I wondered. Like me, my grandmother was an only child. Of course, I wondered why she was so reluctant to talk about her parents, her father especially. Finally, I learned that he was a serious alcoholic who died one night in an alleyway. Her mother and she had a very hard life because of that. She blamed her mother’s early death on her father, claiming her tiny, fragile heart couldn’t take the burden any longer.

  Like her parents, Grandfather Prescott’s parents were long gone. Never once did either of them take me to visit their parents’ grave sites, but I did believe Grandfather Prescott visited his parents’ graves on his own from time to time. They were in a cemetery close by.

  Grandfather Prescott had a younger brother, Brett Edwards, a talented musician. He began playing the trumpet in junior high school and went on to win prizes. His parents wanted him to go to a business school, just as Grandfather Prescott had done, but he rebelled and ran away from home to join a band playing on cruise ships, the first being a remodeled steamship that went up and down the Mississippi from New Orleans. Grandmother Myra wasn’t fond of my grandfather talking about his younger brother. As far as they knew, he was still unmarried, although she said on more than one occasion that she wouldn’t guarantee that he wasn’t a father.

  “Men like him spread their seed all over, indifferent to what misery they cause some poor young woman. You mark my words, missy.”

  “We don’t know anything like that to be true,” Grandfather Prescott said. It was practically the only topic on which he held his ground. She usually retreated but not without a condemning grunt.

  Nevertheless, I had the feeling my grandfather harbored love for his younger brother and a little envy, too. Maybe deep down inside, he longed for the freedom my great-uncle Brett enjoyed, especially now. When I looked at pictures of Brett, I saw a very handsome, much happier-looking man. I had never met him. My grandmother didn’t welcome him to their home anymore. I understood that he had been there last a year or so before I was born and never since. For me, he was almost a fictional character. Years later, my mother would describe the terrible crush she had on her uncle when she was younger and how much she looked forward to seeing him whenever he was able to visit.

  Grandmother Myra disapproved of her liking him so much.

  “He’s a philanderer,” she told my mother. “A womanizer, selfish, venal, and, like all those musicians, into drugs, I’m sure.”

  My mother said they had terrible arguments about him. “It was one of the few times I can remember that my father came to my aid, but no matter, she was never hospitable to Uncle Brett. I’m sure that was why he saw us so infrequently. I know that was why he gave up visiting, even calling them.”

  She said she had always kept up a correspondence with him, and later, he came to her aid. He often sent her postcards from places where he played, and occasionally, he sent her some small gift, a doll, a trinket, inexpensive jewelry, even a watch. My grandmother told me she had thrown out whatever my mother had left in the house when she ran off, so I never saw any of it.

  Sometimes I felt I was putting together my background, whatever family I would claim, like someone doing a big puzzle, finding a piece here and there. It was far from complete. There were deep gaps, but I had confidence that someday I would fill them. The real issue was, would I be happy I had?

  With all this heaviness on my shoulders, I carried out the daily chores I was assigned, completed my homeschool reading and math, and sat gazing out windows, focusing on far horizons. I was like some Old World explorer just waiting for permission and financing to set out on his journey, his eyes focused on the future.

  The possibility of his discoveries kept his heart beating, his body strong.

  Maybe I would find nothing special, but I could never be disappointed, because the journey was what I craved. One day, I would simply open the door and take my first step forward. All the steps to follow were already out there, waiting for me to fill them.

  In the end, I would plant my flag in the soil of my own identity, wouldn’t I?

  I would look into those forbidden mirrors, and I would see who I was.

  “Hi,” my reflected image would say. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

  2

  My grandmother wasn’t going to celebrate my fifteenth birthday at all differently from any of my previous birthdays. There were never any presents and never any cake and candles. For years, I didn’t even know when my birthday was. Eventually, the day, June 25, was acknowledged reluctantly, almost as a passing thought. Until then, my grandmother simply announced that I was eight or nine, whatever, dropping the fact in the middle of some sentence such as, “You should know better for a six-year-old.”

  I never had any doubts that she viewed it as a day of infamy as bad as December 7 or September 11. My birthing was like a bomb dropped on their otherwise happy home, not that I could imagine it ever being a house of much happiness. All I knew during those years was that my mother regretted my birth and deserted both me and my grandparents, and they never really wanted me and the responsibility for me. I supposed I should be grateful that eventually they began to see me differently, differently enough by the time I reached my fifteenth birthday that my grandfather that morning after breakfast talked her into celebrating it.

  “She’s been a very good girl, Myra. It’s good to make people aware of what awaits them when and if they favor Satan and sin, but there is also a time to reward,” he said. “She is doing well with her school-work, she keeps her room as clean as she can, and she says her prayers regularly. All of this also means you’ve done a very good job with her. You can take a deep breath and rejoice.”

  My grandmother thought a moment and nodded. “We can take her to dinner,” she said.

  My eyes popped open. Take me to dinner? I knew my grandparents were frugal people. Having money never meant spending it. People who were not cautious and conservative when it came to that were usually “ripe fruit for the devil’s picking,” Grandmother Myra told me. One of the items topping her list of wasteful spending was going out to eat and paying five times the cost for the same food made at home. “And that doesn’t include the tip!”

  “Well, the Marxes are always talking about the good value at Chipper’s,” my grandfather said.

  Sam Marx and his wife, Trudy, were my grandparents’ closest friends, in that they were practically the only couple ever invited to dinner at our house and the only couple I knew who invited them. Sam had been my grandfather’s factory manager. They had no children. Trudy dressed a little nicer than my grandmother, but as far as makeup went, she used nothing more than some lipstick. Whenever they came to our house, she looked as if she had barely brushed her lips with it. I had the sense that the Marxes were still treating my grandparents with the same deference and respect shown by employees. I never heard them disagree about anything.

  When they were here for dinner and I was helping out, serving and cleaning up like some hired maid, I could feel Trudy’s gaze on me. It was creepy; I sensed she was looking for some evidence to indicate that I would do something or be someone evil. I had no idea what my grandmother had told her about me over the years, but sometimes, when I glanced at her while she stared at me, I felt she was looking at me with delight. I felt confident that if I were her granddaughter, I’d be treated far better.

  “Well, then, choose something clean to wear. Pin up your hair better, and make sure your nails are clean, missy,” Grandmother Myra told me.

  I nodded, trying not to look too excited about it. I sensed a long time ago that if I showed too much enthusiasm for something, she would become suspicious and then forbid it following another one of her credos, “Better safe than sorry.”

  I said nothing. I also knew that if I spe
nt too much time thinking about what I would wear and too much time on my hair, she would reconsider. I went through the day as if it were no different from any other, completing my homework, reading what I had to read, washing clothes, polishing furniture, and, since it was Wednesday and the schedule she had set up required it, washing the kitchen floor.

  Because I had something to look forward to, I wasn’t as tired in the late afternoon as I usually was. I had picked out my newest dress. It did nothing for my figure, but I chose it because it was at least a brighter color than anything else I had, a sharp light blue. I had nothing like matching shoes and no jewelry, not even a wristwatch. She had permitted me to have some colorful ribbons to use to tie up my hair.

  Whenever she relented and bought me something new to wear, she always seemed deliberately to choose a size too big. Any curves that had developed in my body were well hidden. I hated my shoes. They were so dull now, a worn black. She insisted on my having flats: “You’re springing up too fast. People are quick to mistake height for age, and I don’t need anyone who sees you thinking you’re older than you are, especially men.”

  The very thought of a grown man being interested in me was so foreign to my thinking that it became intriguing after she had told me that. Whenever my mind drifted to thoughts about boys, and now men, it was always to draw them up as rescuers, handsome, strong men who could swoop in and take me away. Of course, Grandmother Myra equated physical beauty with some form of danger. Either the woman who possessed it would become too conceited and therefore vulnerable to sin, or she was in danger of attracting the wrong set of eyes.

  I suppose it would be impossible for someone like me living in this house not to grow up with these fears embedded so deeply in her that she believed in them herself. I was very self-conscious about how long I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Whenever they took me anywhere, I did keep my eyes down and avoided looking at boys especially. Every sexual thought I had I immediately subdued. My grandmother had convinced me that I was more vulnerable than other girls. I was on constant guard, waiting for that evil seed inside me to start sprouting.

  She inspected my hands immediately when I came into the living room. I had taken great care with my nails. It satisfied her. She looked at me in my oversize dress, fixed a strand of my hair that had escaped the knot, and then nodded approval.

  “You look very nice,” Grandfather Prescott told me. He looked at Grandmother Myra.

  She reached for a box on the sofa side table beside her and handed it to me. She said nothing.

  Grandfather Prescott said, “Happy birthday, Elle.”

  I was shocked. What could be in a box like that? Slowly, I opened it and saw the silver cross. It was a good six inches long and four inches wide, at least, and it was on a silver chain. How could I wear something so big around my neck? I plucked it out carefully, stunned.

  “I’ll put it on you,” Grandmother Myra said. She took it from me and went behind me. I stood there while she fastened the chain. The cross fell over the crests of my breasts.

  “Isn’t it . . . too big?” I asked, trying not to sound ungrateful.

  “It’s so you’ll never forget,” she said. “You can put it inside your dress.”

  I did so quickly.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Take your sweater,” she told me. “There’s a chill in the air tonight.”

  It was late June, but nights could be cool in Lake Hurley. It was why people from New York City bought and rented summer homes there. We didn’t live on the lake, but we were only about a half mile from it if we went through the woods right behind the house. I had done that only once with my grandfather, who wanted me to see it at twilight. We didn’t see much of it. It was as if we were gazing at something forbidden. He wasn’t a fisherman and never suggested we go for a boat ride. The only way my grandmother acknowledged the lake’s existence was to comment about a breeze that came off it. Many times, I was tempted to go there on my own when I was outside at the rear of the house, which was where my grandmother preferred me to be. But I was afraid of walking off our property without specific permission to do so. It was as if we had an invisible electric fence, and if I crossed the line, I would suffer a stinging shock.

  “You stay in the backyard, missy. No need to be attracting the curious eyes of those city people who come up here and drive past our house,” she told me. “A young girl just standing around or even sitting and reading will bring unwanted attention.”

  Maybe it was unwanted to her, I thought, but not to me. I craved any attention.

  Nevertheless, I avoided the front of the house, afraid that she would further restrict my going out alone. Our house was on a good-size lot, but what made it private was the fact that the land to our right was in some family dispute for as long as I could remember, so no one could build on it, and the land to our left was owned by someone who was waiting forever, it seemed, for its value to go up. The nearest house to ours was a good half mile away on both sides. The sense of isolation was just fine for my grandmother, who wasn’t the type who would walk over to a neighbor’s house to borrow a cup of sugar anyway.

  I loved this time of the year, because the trees were so full and, maybe because of the moisture coming off the lake, so richly green. No matter how bright the day, the inside of the woods looked dark and cool. From time to time, I would spot a buck or a doe and its fawn. Of course, there were too many rabbits and not enough foxes to control their population. No matter how hard my grandfather tried to protect whatever vegetable garden he had created, the rabbits had the best of it. All sorts of birds brought the woods to life with melodies. I could distinguish a robin from a blue jay just by the sounds they made. I knew there were wild ducks on the lake in the summer. I could see them fly in, but except for the one time my grandfather took me there, I never saw them floating on the water.

  My grandfather kept a nice patch of grass in the rear of the house. Occasionally, he would permit me to cut the lawn, but only in the rear. Sometimes, when I sat in the backyard and thought about all this, I imagined I was truly some sort of nature child, so alien to the world around me that I’d be considered as wild as an aborigine or some girl in a lost African tribe. If my grandmother stepped out to see what I was up to, she almost always warned me about thinking too much.

  “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” she would say. “Find something useful to do instead of just sitting there thinking.”

  Why did that frighten her? I wondered. Should it frighten me?

  I imagined that despite my good deeds and my obedience, my grandmother never stopped believing that somehow, for some reason, I would let the devil into their lives. It was as if he was just biding his time. He knew where I lived. After all, he didn’t create evil progeny and just let them drift away, did he? When the time was right, he would call on me. It got so I began to watch for him myself. Maybe he would just come walking out of the dark forest one day, smiling, his arms out.

  “You’re ready,” he would say, and the actions and thoughts my grandmother always expected would begin.

  My grandfather slapped his hands together, shaking me out of my reverie. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s set out. I’m getting hungry.”

  I put on my sweater, and the three of us walked out to their car in the driveway. The cross was cold and heavy on my chest, but I said nothing. I’ll get used to it, I thought. I kept my head down and tried desperately not to look too excited, but this was going to be my first time in a restaurant.

  I got into the rear of the car and sat back with my hands folded on my lap. Grandmother Myra looked at me, and for a moment, I saw her face soften in a way I hadn’t seen.

  “She’s getting to look more like Deborah,” she said.

  My grandfather turned to look back, as if he hadn’t ever looked at me. “Yep,” he said.

  “Thank God for that,” Grandmother Myra said.

  I had to agree but not for the same reason she was thinking. I though
t my mother was a very pretty woman in the pictures I had been permitted to see.

  Because of the relaxed atmosphere, I thought I might risk asking a question or two about my mother.

  “What college did my mother attend?”

  “She went to the state university at Albany,” my grandfather said before my grandmother could object to our talking about her. He started to back out, turning around to see, and added, “She could have gone to a few colleges. She had decent school grades, thanks to your grandmother making sure she did her work properly.”

  Grandmother Myra grunted. “That wasn’t an easy task. If I didn’t ride herd on that girl . . . besides, her grades weren’t that good, Prescott. She was barely above average.”

  “She couldn’t finish college, then?” I asked.

  She spun on me this time. “Of course not! How could she even contemplate such a thing? All that was ruined. All the college tuition lost. Why do you think you’re here?”

  “I just wondered,” I said.

  “She might have gone back to school,” my grandfather offered.

  “Believe that, and I’ll offer you a bridge in Brooklyn for sale,” Grandmother Myra muttered. “Where would she have gotten the money?”

  Even then, without yet meeting her, I thought perhaps she got it from Uncle Brett, the mysterious, handsome, and adventurous Uncle Brett. My grandfather might have suspected that possibility, too, but wouldn’t dare suggest it.

  I wondered if I should push on with another question, but I was terrified that she would get enraged at my continued curiosity and make my grandfather turn back. Instead, I looked out the window and remained silent. Less than twenty minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot of Chipper’s restaurant. I knew what an old-time diner was and thought that was what it looked like. It was certainly not what anyone would call an elegant or expensive restaurant. There were two large windows in the front, and the building was rectangular. It had a dark brown front and a flat roof. It was well lit inside. I thought it was too bright, but when we entered, I was surprised at how crowded it was. Almost every table and booth was taken.