Authors: Belva Plain
“I’ll find it out, you say? I never knew it before, Lore?”
“Yes, you knew it. But when it touches your child, or so I’m told by people who have a child, the cruelty is far worse.”
That was true. She would never forget the look on Eve’s face last night. Never.
“It’s bad enough to have a skeleton pop out of the closet, but in a way it’s worse having to worry all your life about when it’s going to pop out.” And Lore gave her sad smile.
You saw it seldom, that sad little smile, which made it the more impressive when you did see it. Father used to insist that Lore was fundamentally a very sad person.
“Well, it’s out. We’ll simply have to contend with it, and we all will. Joel’s very patient, and he’ll be a support. I wish I could stay home all day with you, Caroline. I’d be a buffer between you, but I can’t. But maybe it’s just as well for you both to face it by yourselves.”
At noon, Eve emerged briefly to eat the lunch that Caroline prepared. She cast off Caroline’s arm, stuck her fingers in her ears, wiped away Caroline’s kiss, and went back upstairs. When she had gone, the stillness became unbearable. The house was forsaken and shiveringly cold. Alarming thoughts ran wild through Caroline’s head.
There was so much to be undone, to be explained away. Think of the thousand questions that a girl
will ask her mother and recall the thousand fabrications with which you replied. Girls are fascinated by weddings:
What did you wear when you and Daddy were married?
So you stumbled over the response:
Oh, the usual. It was a very simple wedding
. You always tried not to contradict yourself and tried, for your own sake, too, not to dwell on the truth of that day.…
Late that afternoon when school was out, Caroline opened the door on a small delegation of girls from Eve’s class.
“We’ve come to talk to Eve,” announced Jill, the best friend. “We want her to go to school tomorrow. We want her to know that nobody’s going to say anything or do any teasing. After all, it isn’t
her
fault.”
The teacher had had a hand in this. The words were fairly spoken: It was certainly not any fault of Eve’s, but purely the fault of Eve’s mother, at whom these girls were casting their curious glances.
“Go up, girls,” she said calmly. “Eve’s in her room.”
So now Walter was back in her life. He was up now in that room where a bunch of little girls, echoing their mothers, no doubt, were reviving him, giggling and speculating as they understandably did over a cheap romance at the movies. Ah, but never mind them! Never mind, if you can help it, the furtive glances and the excessive politeness that will be given you as you go about your customary life.
Never mind, although you do indeed mind, the sly male jokes about Joel that will be told behind his back, and that he will know men are telling behind his back. Oh, the only thing that counts is Eve. How great is the damage to Eve?
That evening it was very great. Apparently the visit of her friends had done nothing for her but increase her resolve to stay out of school. When she failed to come down to dinner, Lore went to her room and found her crying in a fit of despair.
“I couldn’t get anywhere with her,” she reported. “I don’t know. I’m wondering whether Vicky can do anything.”
“Why? Does Vicky know what’s happened?”
“She does,” Joel said grimly. “The mother of one of those little girls is a friend of Gertrude’s. You’ll be interested in hearing Gertrude’s opinion. Vicky told me that her lovely pseudo-mother always suspected that things weren’t all ‘on the up and up’ with us. Vicky, to her credit, was disgusted.”
“Nevertheless,” said Caroline, “we don’t want Vicky talking to Eve.”
Lore defended Vicky. “Why not? She’s good at heart and knows how to get along in the world. I like her.”
“I don’t dislike her, Lore. But I just don’t think she’s the right person to understand this situation.”
“You underestimate her. She’s never had the right chances in life.”
“Lore, dear, you make excuses for everyone.”
“I think we should call Al Schulman,” Joel suggested. “The child can’t be allowed to cry all night. Perhaps he’ll have something to calm her. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m going to call him.”
Dr. Schulman came at once. The summons had not surprised him, for Emmy had already heard the story from someone who had stopped at the Main Street Orangerie and overheard a conversation about it. Therefore, needing little explanation, he went directly to Eve and stayed almost two hours, while the others waited below in a high state of tension.
“She’s calmer now,” he said when he returned. “We had a serious talk. I think, though, she has become a few years older overnight. But that’s no cause for despair. It’s astonishing what a child who is loved can manage to overcome. The Holocaust, for instance.” For a second, his voice faded. “Eve is loved,” he resumed. “And now that I’ve spoken to her, I must think about you two parents also. In your different ways, you have suffered a great blow. I’d like to talk to you about it if you will.”
When he had finished, it crossed Caroline’s mind that once she had declined to confide in this doctor because he had seemed too shallow. How wrong one can be in one’s judgment of another human being!
“Talk to Eve candidly,” he concluded. “Don’t be deceived by her age or by some childish remark she may make. She is capable of understanding more than you think. Tell her frankly how everything happened and how you feel about it.”
Everything?
thought Caroline later, lying restlessly awake against Joel’s comforting shoulder. He slept, but all night long her eyes watched the shadows on the ceiling, heard every creak as the old house rustled and even the tiny jingle of the tags on Peter’s collar when he thumped and stirred in his sleep.
Everything. Tell her everything.
“I need to know about him,” Eve said. “What did he do? What did he look like?”
They were walking along the lakeshore down at the solitary end of the drive beyond the row of houses.
“Get off by yourselves,” Dr. Schulman had advised. “Just mother and daughter. I think the first emotional blowup is past, although there will surely be many others from time to time. But they’ll be smaller once the first shock and rage have been absorbed. And give her a few days, maybe till the end of the week, to stay away from school. The kids will have some other excitement to talk about by then.”
“Do I look like him?” Eve asked for the tenth time or more.
“You know very well that you look like me. Everyone tells you.”
“Exactly like you?”
“As exactly as any two people can resemble each other.”
And yet, now that the issue had become moot,
Caroline was seeing things in Eve that she had not observed, or had not wanted to observe, before. Those horizontal lines across the forehead, so noticeable in a very young man, were already forming on Eve’s forehead. Eve was left-handed; she had not allowed herself to recall that he had been left-handed, too. Eve was compulsively neat in ways that I never was, thought Caroline, and she saw now that she was being directed to see long fingers and long, narrow feet, and the way a head tips back in a roar of laughter.…
She stiffened her shoulders. He hadn’t had much to laugh about, had he, when they all went down to defeat? Hold that thought, she said silently, for whatever small comfort is in it.
They were going before the wind, into its rush. Eve’s long hair streamed as she walked, head down, kicking pebbles. It was already late in the afternoon, and the sun was pale. They had been talking intermittently all day—it was Saturday, and Eve was home—and Caroline was tired. For a person who was known to have energy, she was incredibly exhausted, waiting for Eve’s next words.
“You said you hardly knew—knew each other when you got married.”
“Do you mean when I married your daddy?” Caroline asked gently. “You still sometimes hesitate, I notice, to use the name.
Daddy
. Say it. He’s your father, the only one you’ll ever know.”
“That other—he—will he ever come looking for
me?” asked Eve in a voice so low and fearful that the wind almost carried it away.
“Darling, he doesn’t know you exist. And if he did know, you’d be the last person that he’d want to see. Anyway, it was a long war, and he may well be dead.”
As they walked, the pebbles flew, scuffing the tips of Eve’s shoes. Suddenly she looked up at Caroline, demanding, “How could he have left you like that after he—”
After we had “made love” she meant, and was too embarrassed to say it. Caroline, trying to remember what images of her own parents’ bed she might have harbored when she was twelve, found that she was unable to. Such images were forbidden, and had therefore been hidden away in the remotest chink of the brain.
“After we ‘made love’? Because he realized that he didn’t want me. He had made a mistake. It had been an aberration, which means a really crazy mistake. People think for a short time that they want a thing and then wonder whatever can have made them want it.” Expressively, Caroline threw her hands up. “Why, that’s all wrong! It’s not for me at all!”
“It was very wrong, all the same,” Eve said.
Caroline thought gratefully, She’s beginning to see that I am not the complete, sole villain.
“So then you quickly fell in love with Daddy, right?”
“Yes, that’s the way it was.”
Al Schulman might say, “Tell her everything,” but there had to be limits.
“And you’re still in love with him now?”
The enormous, questioning eyes were looking straight into Caroline’s face. “In love”—the stuff of movie magazines, words that came without meaning, as far from the actual tangle of human emotions as if they had been written for an English-speaking reader in Bulgarian or some other unknown language.
“I love him,” she replied.
There are so many, many ways.…
“He loves you, too. He always tells me so.”
“I know. Shall we go back home?”
“Not yet.”
“The afternoons are getting shorter. It will soon be time for dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But maybe other people are.”
“I don’t care. I have too much on my mind.”
Caroline had to stifle her sigh. It wasn’t over yet, not by a long way. These questions and answers would have to be repeated over and over. These ghosts would rise and reappear.
Now Eve’s defiance sparked. “Jill said her mother said you had to get married so I would have a name.”
Did people have nothing else to talk about but someone else’s pain? True, most people had, like Emmy Schulman, been behaving with maturity and tact, but many had not. How quickly all this information
had leaked out and spread! If only that fool of an Annie had kept still! They had written a nice thank-you letter from California without making mention of anything else. Maybe they hadn’t realized the damage she had caused. Joel said they must realize it and that the letter was to be ignored. But Caroline contradicted him. “If it weren’t for those wonderful, good souls we wouldn’t be here. Put this behind you, Joel. And besides, when will we see them again? They’re at the other end of the country.”
As for herself, she must keep her temper and her patience. “I did not have to do anything I didn’t want to do,” she told Eve. “I wanted you to have a father, a good one. And that’s what you have. What we both have, a man to love and trust. That’s what matters, Eve. Goodness matters.”
“Do you hate him?”
“Who?”
Temper flared again. “Him. That Walter. That Nazi you gave me for a father.”
“I thought we’d gone over all that, Eve.”
Why does anybody ask that question? Joel has never asked it, and he’s the one who’s entitled to if anybody is. But Lore asks it now and then, and it bothers me, though I don’t tell her so. There are so many feelings mixed in that single word and mixed in me: sadness, fury, astonishment, and contempt. What difference does it make now, anyway, whether I hate him or not? It was a long time ago.
“Susan says her parents think maybe you were a Nazi, too.”
“Eve, you positively stop me in my tracks! I ask you, have you ever heard anything more ridiculous than that?”
The two stood still. And suddenly, as Eve said no, they both burst out laughing.
The days, the weeks, and the months passed. Gradually the conversation at home turned to natural subjects: school, Lore’s hospital, and business in the Orangeries. Very, very gradually it became possible to put an arm around Eve, to kiss her and receive a kiss in return.
“We’re getting back to normal,” Joel said. “I think it’s going to be all right, don’t you?”
Without him, and without Lore, too, it would have been very different. They were a pair of sturdy people. Better not to think about how it would be if she had to cope with Eve alone, thought Caroline.
“Yes,” she replied, “I think so.”
Yet there remained in Eve an anguished curiosity that at odd times, in the midst of buying a pair of shoes, setting the table, or feeding the cat and dog, would surge to hurtful words that had to be spoken before they could subside.
You might, Caroline told Joel once, compare Eve’s anguish to a bleed that has to seep until it stops. It will take a long while until only the scar remains.
T
hese were the Eisenhower years, when tourists began to fly across the Atlantic to Europe, and when television was no longer the novelty that had brought the neighbors in to see the first set on the block.
Nevertheless, most people still traveled by train or car, and that was how Joel and Caroline would have taken Eve out West if other things had not intervened.
They stood before the latest Orangerie, now nearing completion in a town some fifteen miles down the highway from Ivy. Most of the familiar orange awnings were already up, the lavish shrubbery was in place, and men were laying flagstones on the rear terrace where in summer, under cool shade, the tables would almost surely be crowded.
“I’m still not used to it,” Joel said. “Number six!
Can you believe it? How could we have dreamed when we started in Ricci’s little place that we’d see anything like this?”