The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Page 3

  “What? The horse-drawn one?”

  “Yes. Hurry!”

  “I can’t follow him, lady. He’s off back to the stables. I can’t take no customers there.”

  “For a hundred dollars?”

  “I might make an exception,” he said, whipping up the horse. “But I want to see it.”

  Kate leaned forward and handed him three twenties. She’d really learned about cash and horse-drawn carriages. This was no moment for American Express, even if it had been the blonde young lady. “Here’s sixty. You’ll get the other forty when we’re there.”

  But, as it happened, they soon caught up with Kate’s “Edwardian” driver, who pulled over and acknowledged defeat, more with a gesture than anything. Cars started honking. Kate handed her driver the other forty, thanked him, got into the “Edwardian” driver’s carriage and said: “Back to the park, my good man.” The man had to go around the block to Sixth Avenue and head back toward the park. Kate waited until they were through the traffic and back on the park road.

  “Why did you take off like that?” Kate asked.

  “It was the papers you were correcting, waiting for me. They rang a bell, somehow. Suddenly, I remembered having heard about you and knew who you were. They hired you, I guess.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘hired,’ ” Kate said. “I haven’t promised anything. I can forget I ever rode in a carriage. I’ve forgotten less forgettable things.”

  “After all your trouble?”

  “No trouble; a pleasure, in fact. And I remembered the gold rings. My brothers used to brag about knowing how to get them. They were already gone in my day. Is this the life you want really, from now on? And of course, there’s Tom.”

  “What made you guess?”

  “Lots of things–his quoting Macbeth mainly, though he thought it was Hamlet. Hamlet may really have been closer: ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ Was that it, or was it Macbeth: ‘cabined, cribbed, confined’?”

  “You mean you understand?”

  “Lord, yes. But most of us don’t have a dream to step into; we don’t have a job to go to.”

  “I got to know this old man who drove. Met him when I was feeding the horses. I’ve always loved horses, not racehorses or riding horses or herding horses, but horses that pull carriages. He wanted to quit, and I offered him enough for his carriage and horse really to tempt him, if he could get them for me and the right to keep them where he did, to live where he did, right close to the stables. He said at first he couldn’t manage it, but in the end he did. I was offering to exchange my escape for his, and I knew it would work if I was patient.”

  “Is that his suit?”

  “No. This outfit is all mine. He was a much smaller man, wizened and disillusioned about the carriages working the park these days.”

  “What about Tom? The worry it’s been to him?”

  “He’s been worried, but I bet he’s also felt alive: something to think about, to plan beyond. It’s brought a change to his life too; it was getting too predictable. As to the department …”

  “I know,” Kate said, “they can all pee up one rope. When will you decide about going back? Not that I want to rush you.”

  “Once more around the park, on me.”

  And so they rode around in silence. The evening was drawing in. “You mean I have a real choice,” the driver said, looking back at her, and when Kate nodded, turned around and continued driving in silence. Until they were leaving the park:

  “Mine has been such an orderly life,” Tania said. “I married when my mother and everyone else thought I should–not that it wasn’t a good marriage. We had children at the right time; they were good children. I guess working was the only unusual thing I did, and of course I became a language teacher, which was okay for a woman. Somehow, except when I was very young, there wasn’t time for a dream, for an adventure. Suddenly, this seemed the perfect thing. A carriage, a horse, an outfit.”

  “You weren’t afraid of being recognized?”

  “Not in this outfit. People see what they expect to see. And I’ve always had a deep voice and a flat chest. Very good legs, though,” Tania added.

  When they pulled up at the curb on Central Park South, Kate said: “I get off here. I understand more than you’ll ever know about how you felt. You decide it the way you want. I shan’t say a word to anyone. And I won’t bother you with any more rides, if you decide to stay with the carriages and horses. But if you decide to go back, just call your Chair, dear Fred Monson, and announce your return for next semester. ‘Never apologize, never explain.’ A good Victorian piece of advice.”

  AS YOU KNOW, Tania decided to return. And from that day to this, no one ever knew where she’d been, and no one ever guessed. They were all glad to see her back–Tom, and the students, and even her colleagues–so she found out she was loved. Maybe that made her return more rewarding. But Kate never knew, because Kate never spoke to her again.

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  This was the only true story she had ever heard, Kate Fansler used to say, that properly began “once upon a time.” Kate, who had never seen the beginning, said it was, nonetheless, as clear to her inner eye as any personal memory, sharp in all its detail, as immediate as sense itself. The family to whom it happened was named Grant. They were in their summer home in New England. “The King was in the counting house, counting out his money; the Queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.” That is, the father, as in this context we should call him, had gone into town for the papers; he had money invested, and wanted to study the stock market pages. The mother, a college professor, was upstairs in her study, ostensibly writing an article for a conference on the uses of fantasy, in fact, reading a novel by Thomas Hardy, which seemed–as she later said, sounding prophetic–to answer to her condition. The children were on the lawn playing a ragged and hilarious game of volleyball.

  There were four of them, three boys and a girl, all twelve years of age. The girl and one of the boys were twins; the other two boys were school friends, come for the weekend. They too were twins, identical as opposed to their fraternal twin hosts, and the badminton set had been their hostess’s gift. They had been invited for two weeks, as a favor to their parents, and because the resident twins were judged too self-reliant and in need of outside stimulation. It had taken a whole day to put up the posts for the net, and another day to practice with the rackets and shuttlecocks. The father had pointed out that they could play volleyball with the same net, and had, the next afternoon, provided the ball.

  There the four of them were, having both learned and invented the game, playing at it furiously and with much shouting–the girl was as good at it as the boys, and taller than the visiting twins–when one of the visiting twins (they do not remain in this story long enough to be named) shouted: “Look! It’s a baby!”

  And, as the four of them would remember the scene and tell of it for the rest of their lives, a baby, wearing a diaper and shirt and nothing else, came toddling toward them out of the bushes that lined the property and across the lawn. The baby was about a year and a half old and appeared to have learned to walk only recently. It rocked toward them, with that unsteady gait characteristic of babies, and laughed, holding out its arms, probably for balance but, as it seemed, reaching toward them. And what seemed most marvelous, it chortled in that wonderful way of babies, with little yelps of delight as it staggered toward them.

  The volleyball players ran down the lawn toward the baby. An adult, or even the sort of twelve-year-old girl who played house and dreamed of herself in a bridal gown, would have scooped up the baby. These children simply stood one on either side of her–which two took the baby’s hands could never, afterward, be agreed upon; perhaps they took turns–and slowly moved, midst coos of encouragement, toward the house. The girl then ran ahead–allowing a boy to take the baby hand she held, or so she insisted–to alert their mother. “Ma,” she c
alled. “A baby walked out of the bushes.”

  The professor, reading of how Clym Yeobright’s mother died, returned to the New England summer afternoon with difficulty. “What do you mean?” she is reported to have said, rather crossly. (The story had been retold so often that parts of it became “authentic,” as other parts continued to be debated.) She was dragged by her daughter to the window–after having returned her eyes to her book as though her daughter had merely said, “An elephant with wings has landed on the lawn”–where she witnessed the baby’s progress toward the house, its hands being held by two attentive boys.

  “Where did it come from?” she not unreasonably asked.

  “Just out of the bushes,” her daughter answered. The professor rushed downstairs and out onto the road: there was no sign of any car or person. Their house was at the end of a dirt road, and any car or person on the road was clearly visible.

  “Did you hear a car?” the professor asked. By this time she had reached the baby and held out her arms: the baby walked into them. The professor held and smelt the baby, and put its cheek to hers, as she had not done with her own children; there had been two, which had (as she admitted only to herself and the mother of the visiting twins) doubled the work while halving those intense moments of a mother and baby alone in the entire world.

  “We didn’t hear anything,” the children all said, jumping around her. “Of course we would have heard a car if there had been one.” This was so obviously true, the professor argued no further. Someone must somehow have crept along the side of the road, set the baby toddling toward the children, and crept away.

  “What did you think of when you saw the baby and heard that story?” the professor was often asked.

  “I thought of Moses,” she always answered. “And, of course, of Silas Marner.”

  This latter allusion turned out to be, on the whole, the more appropriate. The baby was a girl, as they discovered after the father, returning with his papers, had been immediately dispatched back to town for diapers and baby food. The mother with three of the children, the fourth being left downstairs with the baby, searched the attic for a portable crib that had been retained from earlier years, for the possible use of visiting young. When the father returned, and they had changed and fed the baby, they all sat down at the table, the parents with a stiff drink, and discussed the matter.

  “We could advertise,” one of the children said. “Or put up a notice. Like they do with lost cats and dogs.” Everyone laughed but, as the parents were quick to point out, no one had a better suggestion. And then the father looked at the professor and said: “Geraldine and Tom.”

  “Of course,” the mother and the home twins said. “But,” the children asked, “couldn’t we keep her?”

  “Our arms are full,” the professor said happily. “Besides,” she added, “if we’d wanted anyone else, we would have her by now. Our family is complete.”

  “Geraldine and Tom then,” the home twins said, not really disagreeing with their mother. “But,” the girl twin added, “she did seem to choose us.”

  “That’s because we were playing on the lawn,” her twin said. “It seems a good place where children are playing on the lawn.”

  “We’ll have to tell that to Geraldine and Tom,” the father said.

  And that was where the “once upon a time” part of the story ended. The professor went away to call Geraldine and Tom, who immediately drove up from New York and looked at the baby as though she had indeed dropped from the skies. “It was much better than that,” the children insisted. And they had to tell the story again, the first repeat of many. After that, it was courts and judges and social workers and the long, slow process of the law.

  GERALDINE AND TOM, who might as well be known as the Rayleys, were friends of the Grants. Tom was a corporate lawyer who had made partner five years ago, and was wildly successful and overworked. Geraldine ran an elegant clothing shop. Unlike those who discovered late in their thirties that they wanted a child, the Rayleys had always wanted one, but it had just never happened. Only lately, consulting doctors and learning that there was no evident reason for their failure, had they decided to adopt. Here they immediately ran into trouble: they were too old and they were of different religions, to mention only the major points emphasized by the adoption agencies. The other markets for babies they had not tried. Tom was one of those whom anything even touching upon the illegal or shady disgusted: he was a person of almost flaming rectitude and integrity, which, as the Grants used to point out to each other, was a pretty odd thing in a corporate lawyer, dearly as the Grants loved the Rayleys. Geraldine and Tom’s desire for a baby seemed to swell with the passing years, almost, the professor used to say, as a mother’s body swells with the growing baby inside her. Afterward, many people were to remark how amazingly simple-minded the Grants had been. They had a baby who had toddled toward them out from the mountain laurel. They had friends who longed for a baby. What could be more logical than, pending discovery of the baby’s provenance, bringing them all together? “But,” people would say later, hearing the story, “the disappointment later for the Rayleys if the baby’s mother had been found.”

  “It was all we could think to do,” the professor would say when this point was made. “We all seemed to be acting as though we were in some fairy story. Well, we were in a fairy story. And it did work out, so we did the right thing, Q.E.D.”

  For the Rayleys, after many years’ experience of the law’s delay, got to keep the baby. They adopted her legally, but even before that, she was registered for the best school in New York, which Geraldine had attended; she spent her earliest years as a Rayley at an excellent nursery school. The baby, whom they named Caroline, remained as she had first appeared, a laughing, happy child. With adolescence she grew more serious and seemed oddly dissatisfied with her richly endowed life. Fortunately, her parents, as one might expect of a man of Tom’s principles and a woman who endorsed them, were not advocates of material indulgence for children. Caroline was kept on a strict allowance, and had to account for her evenings. Her parents were of a liberal persuasion, however, and despite all the horrors reported daily of adolescent extravagances, they and Caroline always got on. She went away to college and, eventually, to graduate school. In time, she became an assistant professor at a university in New York. That, of course, was where she met Kate Fansler.

  • • •

  IT WAS, HOWEVER, not Caroline but her father, Tom Rayley, who first talked to Kate at any length about that amazing scene on the lawn almost thirty years earlier. Caroline and Kate had become friendly, as happens now and then with full professors and much younger assistant professors. As Kate would often say, the friendship is not one of equals, nor can it pretend to be when one friend has such power, direct or indirect, over the destiny of another. All the same, they suited one another. Kate was reaching that difficult point in some lives when, growing older, one finds one’s ideas and hopes more in accord with those of the young than with those of one’s own contemporaries. Kate’s peers seemed to grow more conservative and fearful as she grew more radical and daring. Not that Kate was then or ever of the stuff from which revolutionaries are made. Perhaps because of her fortunate life, her indifference–either because she had them or did not desire them–to many of the goods of life, she seemed not to barricade herself against disturbing ideas or changing ways. The same could not, surely, be said of Tom Rayley. He came to Kate in fear, though he could scarcely tell her of what. Fear came, he suggested, with his time of life.

  “I have turned sixty,” he said. “It humbles a man. For one thing,” he added darkly, “the body starts falling apart. I’ve never had very much wrong with me, and all of a sudden I find I have to make a huge effort to hold on to my teeth; I’ve got a strange disease of which they know the name but not a cure; I’ve also acquired what they call degenerative arthritis, which turns out to be another term for old age; and when I got the laboratory report from my doctor, not only was my chol
esterol up, but the lab had noted, ‘serum appears cloudy,’ which didn’t bother the doctor but sounded ominous to me. On top of all that, I’d rather Caroline didn’t go off to live with her newfound mother or father in a community somewhere full of strange rites and a profound mistrust of life’s conventions.”

  Kate and Tom Rayley had met when Caroline invited Kate home for dinner. Geraldine, like Tom, lived a life in which the strict control of emotion and the avoidance of untidiness, literal or psychological, were paramount. Highly intelligent, they were good conversationalists, Geraldine in particular offering amusing and revealing accounts of the international world of fashion and the Manhattan world of real estate with which fashion, like everything else, was so intimately connected. Tom seemed rather the sort who takes in information while giving out as little as possible; he was pleasant, but after the dinner Kate realized she knew little or nothing about him.

  Only when she had been, to her astonishment, summoned to lunch for a private interview did Kate discover that Tom Rayley was an impressive man, just the sort one would think of as a senior partner in a corporate law firm. Kate wondered if his democratic convictions came from an open mind or from his Southern boyhood at a time when all Southerners were Democrats. Since Rayley had not turned Republican like so many of his sort, and had settled in New York, she gave him the benefit of the doubt: his was an open mind, fearful perhaps of aging and of loneliness, but not of those chimeras requiring for their alleviation belief in nuclear weapons, separation of the races, and the strict domestication of women.

  Kate was so astonished at his sudden frankness, helplessness, and revelations that she hardly knew what to say.

  “What is the disease with a name but no cure?” she asked without really thinking.

  “It’s a rather personal male disease, apparently of no great significance but calculated to detonate every hideous male fear ever recorded. It’s called Peyronie’s disease, but whether he had it, identified it, or dismissed it is unclear. The only problem once it is diagnosed is–at least in my case–that my liver responded in a regrettable way to the drug supposed to alleviate it. I can’t imagine why we’re discussing this.”