Melancholy Baby

56

Sarah and I drove up Route 93 toward Andover. Rosie had assumed her spot, asleep between Sarah’s feet on the floor near the heater.

“You can do this?” I said.

“Yes.”

She looked pale and tight, and she swallowed often and visibly. It was the way I had probably looked on my first day of school.

“You think this will be good for me?” she said.

“This is beginning to wind down, or up, depending on how you look at it. I think the bigger part you play in it, the more you’ll feel as if you controlled your future, rather than things just happened to you.”

“You sound like my women’s studies teacher.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I hope not.”

It was a bright day, but the landscape was gray and dirty where the snow had melted and acquired dirt and frozen and melted and acquired dirt and frozen. A few moments of lovely white followed by weeks of dirty gray. How metaphoric.

“You think she’s not my mother?” Sarah said.

“We’ll ask her,” I said.

“In some ways, it would be kind of a relief, you know? I mean, she was never very nice to me.”

I nodded. We went past the Academy and left down the hill and parked in front of the Markham house.

“I feel sick,” Sarah said.

“We’re in this together, kiddo,” I said. “We’ll get through it.”

“I wish I hadn’t started all this.”

“You are only asking a question you have the right to ask,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I wish I didn’t.”

“Anyone would have,” I said.

She nodded and didn’t say anything else. Rosie opened one eye as we got out, saw that she wasn’t coming, and settled back with her heater. We walked to the house where Sarah had grown up.

When she let us in, Mrs. Markham was wearing a flowered housedress and sneakers. The house was silent, and felt closed.

Sarah said, “Hi, Ma.”

Mrs. Markham carefully closed the door behind us and locked it.

“So, you’ve decided I’m your mother again?” she said.

Sarah was silent for a moment.

Then she said, “I don’t know what else to call you.”

Mrs. Markham didn’t bother to invite us in. She simply turned and walked into the living room and sat on the couch with her knees together and her hands clasped on top of them. Sarah and I sat across from her. Mrs. Markham’s age and mousiness seemed to have increased dramatically.

“Are you my mother?” Sarah said.

“I’ve raised you your whole life,” Mrs. Markham said without any affect.

“But did you conceive me, carry me to term, give birth to me?” Sarah said.

Mrs. Markham looked at her for so long in silence that I thought she wasn’t going to speak. Then she seemed to sag suddenly.

“No.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t take the tests.”

“George didn’t take it so as to support me. He thought he was your father.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“That’s what them doctors say.”

“Do you know who my mother was?”

“George told me he got some girl in trouble,” Mrs. Markham said heavily. “He said he’d never strayed before and never would again. I knew he was lyin’. He strayed a lot. But he said the girl didn’t want the baby, and would give us money to take it and raise it like it was ours.”

“And you agreed,” I said.

“Sure. We didn’t have any money, and George wasn’t going anywhere. So we agreed.”

“What was the deal?” I said.

“We move away before the baby’s born and take her when she is born and never tell nobody, and we get money every month, for us and for her. It was a lot of money. I don’t know how much it was. I don’t even know how much she got. Nobody ever told me anything.”

“Did you resent it?” Sarah said.

“Was a good deal. Money was good. Until you started nosing around.”

“She resented it,” I said to Sarah, “and she took it out on you.”

“Well, how was I supposed to feel, stuck with some whore’s daughter? How was I supposed to feel?”

“And you never knew the woman?” I said.

“No. It was part of the deal.”

“Is this deal in writing?”

“No.”

“It was self-enforcing,” I said. “If she didn’t pay, you’d tell, and if you told, she wouldn’t pay.”

“Except the bastard never even told me.”

“Secrets are safest when no one knows them,” I said.

“Now what am I going to do?” Mrs. Markham said. “They won’t send any more money. What am I going to do?”

Sarah looked at her. There were tears on Sarah’s face.

Finally, she said, “You know, Mrs. Markham, I don’t really care.”

She stood up and walked out. I followed her.