Mary Russel - Dreamers of the Day

As the saying goes, we were even, Stephen. Karl had advanced his career, and he’d kept his promise to reward me with a trip up the Nile. And I? I would get what I wanted as well: a child of my own.

I would stay in New York until the baby was born. That was as far as I had thought the idea through. Maybe I would stay in the city permanently; I could say I was a widow. Or maybe in a year or two, I would go back to Ohio. If the baby looked like me, I might just brazen it out; if it looked like Karl, I could tell everyone it was an orphan I had adopted.

Son or daughter, I would raise my child with the attention and affection I had always craved, and that Karl had given me—if only for a time and with mixed motives. I would know when to tease and when to soothe and when to be silently sympathetic. I would be interested. I would encourage and cheer on, never belittle or subtly undermine.

Childhood should be a sort of apprenticeship, I decided, a progress from small skills to more daunting ones, and from minor decisions to serious ones. I would rejoice in my child’s growing strength; I would not try to bend it to my will or snap it like a brittle twig.

Every morning, I would ask, “What would you like for breakfast, sweetheart?” And I would pay attention to the answer.

Even if it was “Oatmeal, please.”

The westward crossing was far smoother than the outbound sail. I felt perfectly fine—wondrously healthy, really—with not a hint of morning nausea or seasickness the entire voyage. I played deck tennis in the lee of the steamer stacks and shuffleboard on the forward deck. There was a dance band on board, and I learned to Charleston! I drank and dined with witty travelers and held my own in conversation. When a gentleman offered me a cigarette, I laughed and said, “Why not?”

Mumma, of course, was appalled. I do wish you would stop acting like you’re so special. It’s just silly vanity, all this sophistication you pretend to have.

I’m not pretending, and it’s not vanity. It’s just who I am, Mumma. You were always afraid of me, weren’t you.

Afraid! Why on earth should I be afraid of my own daughter?

I don’t know, but it’s the truth. Or maybe you were afraid of who you really were. You had ideas of who each of us should be, and none of us was what you wanted. Everything real frightened you.

Well, just look at the real you! Smoking, drinking, whoring with that Jew! Do you suppose it is my pleasure to find fault in my daughter? It is my duty, for all the good it’s done either of us. And now, when I think of you living without Jesus— Well, I can’t bear to think of what will happen to you when you die. You’ll be sorry, I expect. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

“Oh, Mumma,” I said aloud, blowing smoke at her memory, “do shut up.”

That’s telling her, my brother Ernest said. Good for you, Aggie.

Mumma did the best she could, Lillie whispered. That’s all any of us can do.

Cold comfort, I thought, and stood to leave my cabin.

“Come on, Rosie!” I said, snapping on her leash. “Life is for the living! Pooh, pooh, skiddoo! Drink up—the night is young!”

OF COURSE, it is not always easy for a woman of forty to conceive. What might seem a significant delay can be a mere irregularity. Before the steamer reached New York, I learned that I was no longer pregnant, if indeed I ever had been.

It rained that night, and on into the next day. You won’t believe it, but I’d almost forgotten rain. Remarkable, how quickly one gets used to good weather.

Rosie and I went out on deck as usual the next morning, and took our walk around the ship in the glassy, gray light of the North Atlantic. “Just you and me again, Rosie!” I whispered to her, my tears lost in the general soaking we got. “We’ll be all right, won’t we. We’ll be fine.”

And we were, truly. For a long while, anyway.

It was fully spring when we got home to Cedar Glen. Rosie had a fine time reacquainting herself with the yard, chasing a generation of chipmunks that hadn’t learned to fear her. We had missed the March mud entirely and the chilly April rain—that alone was almost worth the price of a trip to Egypt. Late-season tulips and daffodils were still in bloom. Lilacs and peonies were showing bud.

Everything in the house looked powdered, but the weather was so balmy that I opened all the windows and let the breeze help me with the dusting. Seeing me outside flapping the cleaning cloths, the pastor from Mumma’s congregation stopped to say hello and welcome me home. “We’d be very pleased to have you come and give a lecture on the Holy Land, Miss Shanklin.” I promised I would think about it.

Neighbors caught me up on all the news. There was a big snowstorm in late March. Old Mr. Ellison passed away, which everyone agreed was a mercy. A land speculator had been sniffing around the neighborhood. Name of Hartigan. He was looking to buy up properties for a development like the one those Van Swerington brothers built over in Shaker Heights.

“Oh, and the Beasley girl got married,” I was told several times and always with a wink that implied: kind of a hurry-up deal, there. Then they’d shrug and say, “It’s a different world.” Naturally, I’d agree.

“Well,” they’d say, “got to get to town. Did you have a nice time on your trip?”

“Oh, yes,” I’d tell them. “It was very educational.”

It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be so different when you’re away from home? Then, surrounded by familiar people and things, you slip right back into all your habits, as though you were pulling on an old woolen cardigan: stretched out and unflattering, but comfortable and soft.

Sure enough, Mr. Robert Hartigan contacted me through my lawyer, Mr. Reichardt. He wished to inquire about my selling him the house or, more accurately, the property it sat on, for he meant to tear it down and build something grander in its place. I declined his offer. He must have thought that I was holding out for a better price, but I simply hadn’t decided what I wanted to do next.

One fine June morning, Pastor Eastman paid me another call—the third since my return. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was talk about my trip to Mumma’s friends, but I was running out of polite ways to decline his invitation to give a lecture to the congregation.

That afternoon I made up my mind to look for an apartment in downtown Cleveland. It was exhilarating to survey all the possibilities, thinking of how my new surroundings would make me feel. The most exciting prospect was down on Euclid Avenue in a brand-new building with its own little fenced-in park, where Rosie could chase squirrels.

The next time I got a call from Mr. Hartigan, he named a truly startling sum, and I agreed to sell. A few weeks later, we met at the bank in Mr. Reichardt’s watchful, lawyerly presence. “You’re a fine businesswoman,” Mr. Hartigan told me as I put pen to paper. “Reichardt here tells me you come by it honestly. I hear your mother was quite an entrepreneur.”

“Thank you,” I said, and pardon my French, but I made damn sure Hartigan’s check was good before the contract was signed! Mumma would have been pleased by that much, at least.

Laying the papers in his briefcase and snapping it shut, Mr. Hartigan asked, “Have you decided what you want to do with the things that are still in the house, Miss Shanklin?”

“Sell them, junk them, give them away,” I said breezily. “Out with the old, in with the new! None of it will look right in my new place.”

Mr. Hartigan left the bank happily planning to bulldoze my childhood home. Mr. Reichardt and I went to lunch afterward and talked about investments. “You ought to think about putting some of that money into stocks,” he said, handing me a broker’s card. “This is my man. He’s got the golden touch.”