All Through The Night

16

Sondra had promised herself that she wouldn’t go near St. Clement’s again. If Granddad weren’t coming in for the concert, I’d go to the police right now, she thought. I can’t live like this any longer. If someone found the baby in those few minutes, and read the note and decided to keep her, and she’s being raised in New York, then there might be a fake birth certificate. It would have been easy enough for someone to claim the baby was delivered at home. In that hotel, no one knew that I had given birth-I never had a single pain.

All the pain has come afterwards, she reflected as she lay awake Sunday night. As dawn was breaking, she finally drifted off. After having slept for only a few hours, she awoke with a blinding headache.

She got up and listlessly put on her jogging clothes. A run might clear my head, she decided. I’ve got to be able to concentrate on practice today. I’ve done so many things wrong-I don’t want to add ruining the concert for Granddad to the list.

She had promised herself that she would stay in Central Park today, but when she came near the northern end of the park, her feet turned west. Minutes later she was standing across the street from St. Clement’s, remembering once again the moment when she had held her baby for the last time.

It had warmed up a little, and the street was busier, so she knew she couldn’t dawdle for fear of drawing attention to herself. The snow that had been arctic white on Thursday was now almost fully melted, and the remaining dregs covered with soot.

It was very cold that night, she remembered, and the snow on the sides of the Street was icy. That secondhand stroller had a stain on the side. I scrubbed the inside, but it was so terribly shabby that I hated to lay the baby in it even for a minute. Someone at the hotel had thrown out the shopping bag I used as extra protection. I remember it had a Sloan’s logo on it. I bought the bottles and formula at a Duane Reade pharmacy.

Sondra felt a tap on her shoulder. Startled, she turned to see the concerned face of a somewhat plump, redheaded woman of about sixty. “You need help, Sondra,” Alvirah said gently. “And I’m the one to give it to you.”

They took a cab back to Central Park South. Once in the apartment, Alvirah made a pot of tea and popped bread in the toaster.

“I’ll bet you haven’t had a bite to eat today,” she said.

Once again close to tears, Sondra nodded in agreement. She felt a kind of unreality, coupled with a great sense of relief. Now that she was in this strange apartment with this strange woman, she felt comfortable.

She knew she was going to tell Alvirah Meehan about the baby, and she sensed just from Alvirah’s presence that Alvirah would somehow find a way to help her.

Twenty minutes later, Alvirah told her firmly, “Now listen, Sondra, the first thing you’ve got to do is to stop beating up on yourself. That was seven years ago; you were a kid. You didn’t have a mother. You felt responsible to your grandfather. You had your baby all by yourself, but you planned for it and you planned well. You had clothes and formula and bottles all ready, and you saved every nickel so the baby would be born in New York because you knew you wanted to live here someday. You dressed the baby and put her, nice and warm and safe, in a stroller on the stoop of the church rectory. You had chosen the church that had saved your grandfather when he knew his arthritis was robbing him of the gift he had as a violinist. You phoned the rectory less than five minutes later, and you thought the baby had been found by someone there.”

“Yes,” Sondra said, “but suppose some kids just pushed the stroller away as a joke. Suppose the baby froze to death, and when someone found her, they didn’t want to be blamed… Suppose-”

“Suppose some good people found her and she’s now the light of their lives,” Alvirah said with a conviction she didn’t feel. Good people would have called the police and then tried to adopt her, she thought. They wouldn’t have kept quiet about it all these years.

“I can’t ask more than that,” Sondra said. “I don’t deserve more than that, because I just don’t know..”

“You deserve a lot more than you think you do. Give yourself credit,” Alvirah told her briskly. “Now you’ve jot to get on with your violin practice and give New York music lovers a treat. You leave the detecting to me.” Then, spontaneously, she added, “Sondra, do you know how beautiful you are when you smile? You’ve got to do more of that, hear me?”

Over yet another cup of- tea, bit by bit, she drew Sondra out.

“Can you imagine what it was like for my poor grandfather, living alone, a music critic and violin teacher, to be suddenly stuck with a ten-year-old child to raise?” Sondra asked, a smile playing around her lips. “He had a very nice four-room apartment in a good building on Lake Michigan in Chicago, but still it was tiny, and he couldn’t afford more space.”

“What did he do when you moved in?” Alvirah asked.

“He changed his whole life for me. He turned his study into a bedroom and gave me the big bedroom. Whenever he went out, he hired someone to come in and mind me and cook for me. I might add, Granddad loved to go out to dinner with his friends, and, of course, he went to many concerts. There were a lot of things he had loved to do that he gave up for me.”

“You’re putting yourself down again,” Alvirah said, interrupting. “I bet he was lonely before you came. I bet he took great comfort in having you with him.”

Sondra’s smile got wider. “Maybe, but the trade-off in having me as company was his freedom to come and go, all the little luxuries he had enjoyed.” The smile vanished. “I guess I did make it up to him in a way. I am a good musician, a good violinist.”

“Bingo!” Alvirah said. “You’re finally saying something good about yourself.”

Sondra laughed. “You know, Alvirah, you do have a way with words.”

“That’s what my editor says,” Alvirah agreed. “Okay, I get the picture. You felt the responsibility to succeed, you won the scholarship, you met someone attractive and gifted, you’d just turned eighteen and you fell for him. He probably told you how crazy he was about you, and, let’s face it, you were vulnerable. You didn’t have a mother and father, or brothers and sisters. Instead you had a grandfather who by then was starting to get sick. Have I got it straight?”

“Yes.”

“We know the rest. Let’s skip to the present. No one as pretty and talented as you are, lives in a vacuum. Have you got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Too quick an answer, Sondra, which means you do have one. Who is he?”

There was a long silence. “Gary Willis. He’s on the board of the Chicago Symphony,” Sondra said reluctantly. “He’s thirty-four, eight years older than I am, very successful, very handsome, very nice, and he wants to marry me.”

“So far, so good,” Alvirah volunteered. “And you don’t care about him?”

“I could. I’m just not ready for marriage. Right now I’m an emotional basket case-I know that. I’m afraid that if I do get married, I’ll never be able to look at my newborn’s face without knowing that I left its sibling in a shopping bag out in the cold. Gary has been very patient and understanding with me. You’ll get to meet him. He’s bringing my grandfather in for the concert.”

“I like the sound of him already,” Alvirah said. “And don’t forget, ninety percent of women today juggle husbands or families and careers. I know I did.”

Sondra looked around the tastefully furnished apartment and out over the spectacular view of Central Park. “What do you do, Alvirah?”

“Right now, my career is lottery winner, problem solver and contributing columnist to the New York Globe. Until three years ago I was a spectacular cleaning woman.”

Sondra’s chuckle indicated she wasn’t sure whether to believe her or to take what she said as a joke, but Alvirah did not elaborate. Plenty of time later for the history of my life, she thought.

They got up together. “I must get to practice,” Sondra said. “I’ve got a coach coming today who has a reputation that sends chills down the spines of performers like me.”

“Well, you go and give it your all,” Alvirah said. “I’m going to figure out a way to try to track down that baby of yours without anyone knowing who’s doing it. I’ll call you every day, I promise.”

“Alvirah, Granddad and Gary will be coming in the week before the concert. I know Granddad will want to go to St. Clement’s. He’ll be so sad to hear that Bishop Santori’s chalice is missing. But in case we should run into Monsignor Ferris when we’re there, will you talk to him first and explain that you and I have talked, and ask him please not to let Granddad know I’ve been hanging around the church?”

“Absolutely,” Alvirah said promptly.

When they walked through the living room, Sondra stopped at the piano, where John Thompson’s Book for Mature Beginners was on the rack, open to “All Through the Night.”

She stopped and played the melody with one hand. “I’d forgotten all about that song; it’s lovely, isn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, she played it again and softly sang, “Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee, All through the night; Guardian angels God will send thee, All through the night.”

She stopped. “Sort of appropriate, isn’t it, Alvirah?” Her voice broke. “I hope my baby found a guardian angel that night.” She looked suddenly as if she might cry.

“I’ll call you,” Alvirah promised as Sondra rushed out.