Melancholy Baby

7

Sarah’s parents lived on School Street, which branched off from Main Street opposite the Academy. Their house was down the hill a ways. It was a very large, white nineteenth-century house with a wide wraparound porch. Classes had started at Taft, and Sarah would be gone. It seemed as good a time as any to go visit her parents. It had to be done sometime.

Her mother answered my ring. She was a small, dark-haired woman with a furtive manner. She looked about fifty.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Sunny Randall.”

“Oh, Ms. Randall, thank you, please come in.”

The house was big and cluttered and full of costly furniture that didn’t go together very well. Mrs. Markham scuttled ahead of me, as if she was afraid someone would yell at her.

“Please, let’s go in the sunroom,” she said. “I hope you won’t find it too warm there.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” I said.

“George,” Mrs. Markham called. “Sunny Randall is here.”

George was on his feet when we went into the sunroom.

“Miss Randall,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

He was tall enough, with a lot of bushy hair, wearing the kind of low-cut reading glasses you can buy at the drugstore. And he had the same stoop-shouldered bearing his wife had. They both looked as if they expected a scolding.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

“Oh, no, no,” he said. “Our pleasure, really.”

He had a deep, hearty voice with very little accent. The boom of it was at odds with his tentative bearing.

“Will you have coffee?” Mrs. Markham said.

“No, thank you.”

“Or some tea?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Spring water?”

I smiled and shook my head.

“I think we have some V8 juice,” she said.

Jesus Christ!

“Nothing, thank you,” I said. “You understand that I am here as your daughter’s representative.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Markham said.

I looked at Mister.

“Yes,” he said. “Certainly.”

“She has employed me to locate her birth parents.”

They both smiled and nodded.

“What can you tell me about that?” I said.

Mister and Missus looked at each other.

“Oh, my, I’m sorry,” George said. “But we really don’t know what to say.”

“Because?”

“Well, I...” he looked at his wife. “We... I don’t wish to be offensive. But we are her birth parents.”

“She doesn’t think so.”

“I know. We feel so sad about that. We’ve told her and told her.”

Mrs. Markham chimed in. “We have, we’ve told her, and she still doesn’t believe us. What can we do?”

“Allow your DNA to be tested.”

Neither of them said anything.

“Sarah tells me that you’ve declined to do that.”

“We just, we... it isn’t something we can do,” Mrs. Markham said. “Is it, George?”

“No, we can’t do that.”

“Why not?” I said.

Neither of them said anything. Both of them looked at the floor. I waited. The air was thick with silence. Both of them kept shaking their heads.

“Are you uncomfortable with your daughter feeling she’s adopted, when in fact she isn’t?”

They both nodded.

“Wouldn’t DNA testing make all this go away?”

Neither of them appeared to hear me.

“Or if she were adopted, what would be so bad about that?” I said.

“She’s not adopted,” Mrs. Markham said to the floor.

“Then why not undergo a simple procedure to prove it?”

Nothing.

“Sarah tells me she was born in Chicago and moved here to Andover as an infant.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Markham said.

“When would that have been?”

Mrs. Markham looked at Mr. Markham and he looked back. They both frowned thoughtfully.

Then Mrs. Markham said, “1982. The fall of 1982.”

I smiled charmingly and said, “Why did you move?”

“We didn’t want our daughter raised in the city.”

“We wanted a more exclusive environment for her,” Mr. Markham said.

“Why here?”

“We hoped perhaps she could go to the Academy when she got older.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“The best-laid plans,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Markham said.

“I was being literary,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Any other reason for moving here?”

“We had friends, I think.” She smiled at me so I wouldn’t be mad. “It’s so long ago, but I think some friends had lived here and said it was nice.”

“Good, solid New England values,” Mr. Markham said.

People said things like that — it was so long ago. But in fact twenty-one years isn’t so long ago. Most people can remember most things of any importance from twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years ago, after a high-school dance, I was making out in the back of a car with Bruce McBride and trying to decide how far to let him go. I was wearing a blue spaghetti-strap dress, and high heels that made walking difficult. My mother thought the outfit looked cheap, but my father had said if I was old enough to have a date, I was old enough to decide how I wanted to look.

“Probably can’t remember their name,” I said.

“No, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Markham said. “Can you remember, George?”

He shook his head.

“Have you always lived in this house?”

“Yes. All Sarah’s life.”

“Except for the few months in Chicago.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do in Chicago?” I said.

“Do?”

“For a living?”

“Oh, I was at home,” Mrs. Markham said.

“How about you, Mr. Markham?”

“I worked in radio,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “On air?”

“Yes. I was the studio announcer.”

“At a station in Chicago?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you remember the station?”

“No, not really,” Mr. Markham boomed. “I worked at several.”

“You don’t remember where you worked?”

He smiled sadly and shook his head.

“I, we, neither of us has much of a memory for things. I’m sure we must seem stupid to you.”

They didn’t seem stupid. They seemed dishonest. But I knew if I stuck at it, all I would get was endless reaffirmation of their dishonesty. I smiled at them both.

“And since Chicago?” I said. “What have you been working at since Chicago?”

“Oh, I work from home.”

“Really,” I said. “What kind of work?”

“I manage our portfolio,” he said. “The Internet makes it so much easier to do.”

“You live on your investments?”

“Yes. I made some wise” — he chuckled — “perhaps lucky, investments when we were in Chicago and...” He shrugged modestly.

“And you’ve lived off it ever since?”

“George is very good at investing,” Mrs. Markham said.

“I’ll bet he is,” I said.

We stood. We walked to the door. We shook hands. They stood in the doorway as I walked down the front walk toward my car.

They looked entirely forlorn.

George is very good at investing, I thought, my ass!